101 Uses for a (Live?) Puppy

I've always been intrigued by out of date topical references. Like the final chorus of the Suede song Animal Nitrate, in which Brett Anderson (or Bert, as the NME rather gloriously used to call him) sings 'now you're over twenty-one' in the place of 'oh it turns you on'. Listening to that song at the age of twenty, it seemed incredibly potent – the age of consent for heterosexual sex may have been eighteen, but at that stage consenting sex between gay men was still illegal in the UK for those under twenty-one. I was reminded of this today, when I came across an early modern topical reference which initially left me in a state of bafflement greater than that of a twenty-year-old listening to Animal Nitrate in 2007. From Thomas Nabbes's play Tottenham Court, performed at Salisbury Court in 1633 and published in 1638, from a discussion between two tenants who are supposed to be looking for their landlord's missing daughter:




'As sleepy as if I had eaten a Puppie'? Having read this at a point when I was feeling pretty sleepy myself, my initial reaction was to wonder, does eating puppies makes you sleepy? Or did people think that eating puppies might make you sleepy? Are puppies particularly sleepy? Sleepier than, say, kittens? (Having owned neither cat nor dog, I have no data on which to base any theories of relative animal-sleepiness, though I seem to recall that baby guinea pigs were pretty damn snoozy…)

A Google search just gave me sleepy puppies on YouTube, while searching Literature Online revealed nothing except the frankly dubious advice from The Charitable Pestmaster, or, The Cure of the Plague (1641) by Thomas Sherwood, 'Practitioner in PHYSICK', that you can cure someone of the plague by laying a puppy on their stomach:



Sadly (and you're probably ahead of me here), having consulted a review in a 1887 number of Notes and Queries (by putting tiny, tiny bits of text into Google Scholar), it seems that the Tenant's puppies should be poppies. Just a seventeenth-century malapropism, then. Ho hum.