It is probable that this verse is a spoof of a scandal during the period of Queen Elizabeth I. The cat is Elizabeth I and the dog is Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whom she on one occasion referred to as her 'lap dog'. In the Broadway musical Rent, Maureen Johnson  protests the devastation of a housing lot for the structure of a cyber-arts studio. She uses images from this nursery school rhyme in her protests, chronicling a perverted fantasy account of the poem in the number "Over the Moon".