Where does the term 'copycat' originate?

'COPYCAT': Where does the term come from? Brahna Siegelberg explains. "Unlike monkeys and parrots, cats aren't actually known for imitative behavior, but the term is somewhat logical since "cat" has been an insult since the medieval period. Cats were associated with all sorts of evil and mischief. In an early-13th-century monastic guidebook for female monks called Ancrene Riwle, for instance, the anonymous author warns ascetics against becoming "cats of hell." (The term "hell-cat," by the way, began to crop up around 1603, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) More famously, Shakespeare used "cat" in a similarly negative sense in All's Well That End's Well; Count Bertram tells his right-hand man that Captain Dumain seems increasingly sleazy: "A pox upon him for me, he's more and more a Cat." Judging from this etymological history, a "copycat" isn't someone who copies, like a cat, but a jerk prone to imitation." There you go.