[In the following essay, Hadfield suggests that an episode in Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus was adapted from a passage in Beware the Cat.]

It is generally agreed by scholars that the incident of the horse-corser in Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, extant in both ‘A’ and ‘B’ texts, is either the work of Marlowe's anonymous collaborator or co-written by the collaborator with Marlowe.¹ It is possible that this episode may have been adapted from a passage in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, perhaps first published in 1561,² entered into the Stationers' Register between 22 July 1568 and 22 July 1569³ and surviving in two editions of 1570 and 1584 recorded in the STC.⁴

In Doctor Faustus, scene xv,⁵ Faustus sells the horse-corser a horse for forty dollars and warns him not to ride the animal into water. The horse-corser ‘thinking some mystery had been in the horse’ (lines 27-8) duly does just this only to find ‘I had nothing under me but a littel straw and had much ado to escape drowning’ (lines 29-30). In Beware the Cat during a discussion of the trickery performed by witches between the narrator, Master Streamer, and ‘another of the company which had been in Yreland’,⁶ the same piece of duplicity is said to be a common occurrence in Ireland:

Witches used to send to the markets many red swine fair & fat to see unto as any mought be, & would in that forme continew long, but it chanced the buiers of them to bring them to water: immediately they found them returned either into wisps of Haye, Straw, olde rotten boords or some other such like trumpery, by meanes whereof they have lost their money or such other cattel as they gave in exchange for them.

(36)

If Baldwin's text is the source of the incident in Doctor Faustus it would strengthen the hand of those critics who argue that Marlowe and his circle were strongly influenced by Protestant writings. Baldwin, himself a dramatist, had been one of the chief figures in the group of Protestant writers gathered at the court of Edward VI, which had included Thomas Sackville, co-author of Gorbaduc. It would also suggest that the importance of Baldwin goes further than his crucial role in editing A Mirror for Magistrates.⁷

Notes

1. The scene is numbered ‘xv’ in John D. Jump's Revels Edition (Manchester, 1962). Fredson Bowers numbers the scene ‘xiv’, in The Complete Works, ii (Cambridge, 1973). See also W. W. Greg, Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (Oxford, 1968), 256-9.

2. See William Baldwin, Beware the Cat and The Funerals of Edward the Sixth, ed. William P. Holden (Connecticut, 1963), introduction, 10-12.

3. A Transcript of the Stationers Register, 1554-1640, i, ed. E. Arber (London, 1875), 389.

4. STC, i.57.

5. All references to the Revels edition.

6. Holden (ed.), 31. All references to this edition.

7. On Baldwin see Stephen Gresham, ‘William Baldwin: Literary Voice of the Reign of Edward VI’, HLQ, xliv (1980-1), 101-16; DNB entry; A Mirror for Magistrates, ed. L. B. Campbell (Cambridge, 1938), introduction, 21-5.