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while a cat in a red jacket holds a fiddle in the manner of a string bass.]]


RHYME


:Hey diddle diddle,
:The cat and the fiddle,
:The cow jumped over the moon,
:The little dog laughed to see such fun,
:And the dish ran away with the spoon.


ORIGINS

It is likely that this poem is a satire of a scandal during the time of Queen Elizabeth I .
The cat is Elizabeth I and the dog is Robert Dudley , Earl of Leicester, whom she once referred to as her ' Lap Dog '.


TOLKIEN'S VERSION


J. R. R. Tolkien invented (by Back Formation ) the imagined original ditty that is recorded in the simplified nursery rhyme. The title of this version as given in '' The Adventures Of Tom Bombadil '' is " The Man In The Moon Stayed Up Too Late ". To this he also wrote a companion poem titled "The Man in the
Moon Came Down Too Soon." This is included in '' The Fellowship Of The Ring ''.


RENT


In the Broadway musical Rent , Maureen Johnson (originally played by Idina Menzel) protests the destruction of a housing lot for the building of a cyber-arts studio. She uses imagery from this nursery rhyme in her protests, chronicling a twisted dream version of the rhyme in the number "Over the Moon".