Tybalt

The name of Juliet’s cousin, killed by Romeo in William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1596). The character appears earlier as Tebaldo, an Italian form of Theobald, in Luigi Da Porto’s novella Giulietta e Romeo (1524), one of Shakespeare’s sources. Shakespeare was also inspired by Tybalt the Cat, from Thibault, the French form of Theobald, in the medieval Reynard the Fox fables, as suggested by Mercutio’s calling Tybalt the “prince of cats.”