Hey Diddle Diddle

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In this rendition, a dish, spoon, and other utensils are anthropomorphized while a cat in a red jacket holds a fiddle in the manner of a string bass.

William Wallace Denslow's illustrations for Hey Diddle Diddle, from a 1901 edition of Mother Goose

Cow jumps spoon, according to Denslow

Hey Diddle Diddle is a nursery rhyme.

1 Rhyme

[edit] 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.

An alternate version of this nursery rhyme is....

Hey diddle, diddle,

The cat and the fiddle,

The cow jumped over the moon;

The little dog laughed to see such sport,

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

[edit] 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'. It is also speculated that the 'dish' is a server at the royal court, whereas the 'spoon' refers to a taste-tester.

[edit] 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"; it also appears in The Fellowship of the Ring. He also wrote a companion poem titled "The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon." This is included in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

[edit] 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".