[In the following essay, expanded from a lecture originally delivered in 1992, Bonahue examines the textual framing produced by the several component narratives in Beware the Cat.]

The reader or critic seeking entry to the fictional world of William Baldwin's Beware the Cat could do worse than consult, as a kind of aesthetic pylon, the woodcut of three animals appearing on the verso of the first edition's title page (Figure 1). (Figure 1 omitted.)¹ The largest and fiercest of this beastly trio crouches at the top, menacing the viewer with sharp fangs and claws, indicating its ability (and impending willingness) to inflict pain. The second, considerably smaller and differently proportioned, scurries to the left with captured prey clenched in its teeth. The third, similarly small but more docile, heads in the opposite direction with a wry smile and the fur along its spine ruffled in excitement. While the title page invites the assumption that all three creatures are cats, these portraits are sufficiently ambiguous to allow other identifications, and the variations among them might even suggest creation by different artists. All three animals, however, are securely framed—or caged, as it were—within a neat border. Although highly individualized, they inhabit a single woodblock.

In a similar way, the “text” of Beware the Cat is constituted by a multeity of subordinate components, varying in size, appearance, personality, and narrative origin, but inhering within the integrated artifact of the physical book. A reader perusing the William Gryffith edition of 1570, for example, encounters first a distinctive title page, backed by the illustrative woodcut already noted. Next comes a dedicatory letter addressed by the author to the courtier John Young, followed by an authorial memoir labeled “The Argument.”² These prefatory items introduce the main narrative, an “Oration” in three parts by a fictional Master Streamer. Accompanying Master Streamer's report is an extensive marginal gloss, evidently written by the author. Then, after the Oration, the author explicitly resumes responsibility for the text, offering a didactic “Exhortation” in prose addressed to the reader, and he concludes the whole by transcribing a verse “Hymn,” reportedly of Streamer's making, addressed to the Creator.

Like the individualized creatures in the woodcut, each of these discrete components produces a miniature artifact in its own right, a provisional text that engages the reader as a quasi-independent narrative. When read as part of a greater whole, however, each component interconnects with the others to form a complex network of narrative activities, all of which are contained within the single volume. Moreover, each element not only operates as a self-contained entity but also, in its provisional independence, marks a narrative border to be confronted and crossed by the reader pursuing a course through the textual data.

Aesthetically, but also spatially and temporally, such borders manifest themselves as frames, the boundaries that separate a fiction—whether a literary work, a theater piece, or a painting—from the actual conditions that circumscribe it.³ For example, the title page of Beware the Cat, like most, acts as a frame that sets the world of the book apart from the world inhabited by the reader, a gateway through which the reader passes into a created realm of artifice. At the same time, however, a frame inhabits ambiguous marginal space contained wholly by neither the artifact nor actuality. Perhaps the most important function of a frame, then, is to mediate between fictional space and the actual world, or, in terms of narratology, to provide a transitional link between two or more distinct discursive fields. Baldwin's innovative juxtaposition of framing elements, including the placement of additional frames within frames, produces a series of disjunctions and continuities between the various levels of simulated reality present within the fiction itself.

Recent critics have produced a polyphony of commentary on Beware the Cat, at times addressing its intricate complex of framing devices. As Arthur F. Kinney notes, its “large number of narrative frames within frames makes the tripartite pargena preceding The Adventures of Master F. J. look simple indeed.”⁴ Analyzing its position in the evolution of prose genres, Ringler cites this “novel” as “the first original piece of long prose fiction in English,” while Stephen Gresham calls it “the finest piece of anti-Catholic satire, by literary standards, written during this period.”⁵ Moreover, John N. King views the work as “a very early example of the kind of experimentation with modes of narration and point of view that characterizes modern fiction.”⁶ In his study of Beware the Cat as a radical cultural object in the transition from Catholic oral culture to Protestant print culture, Terence N. Bowers convincingly argues that “Baldwin's work enacts the potentialities of reading as an agent of social and cultural change.”⁷ In its sustained representations of Tudor culture, the work reveals a great deal about contemporary religion and morals, a function in keeping with its overtly satirical, even polemical, intention.

While Beware the Cat is sufficiently rich to accommodate many such explorations of its canonical and cultural position, my present purpose is otherwise. I am concerned here with the framing effect produced by the work's several component narratives, and particularly with the authorial voices that lie behind them. The hermeneutic signals produced by prefatory and conclusory components, and by the marginal gloss framing Master Streamer's oration, confront, interrogate, and to some extent deconstruct the work's narrative authority. Proceeding through the text sequentially, in a readerly manner, reveals that the frames surrounding and coincident with Master Streamer's discourse present the reader with interpretive cruxes that continually jeopardize narrative reliability. The component narratives establish generic ambiguity, construct realistic yet fictional scenes, invoke three separate narrative voices, and interpenetrate in such a dazzling way that the “centrality” of Master Streamer's oration and the “authority” of its marginal gloss are finally left in question. Moreover, such an investigation of narrative reliability throws into doubt readings conducted along simple lines. While statements regarding the work's thematic meaning or historical relevance are not entirely exploded by the work's authorial ambiguity, they are necessarily complicated by it.

Beginning with the title page, the first of many framing devices, we encounter a heterogloss of generic signals (Figure 2). (Figure 2 omitted.) There we read that Beware the Cat constitutes “a marvelovs hystory … Conteynyng diuerse wounderfull and incredible matters. Very pleasant and mery to read” (xxxi). This title promises to describe a “history,” which, in the modern sense, will be grounded in events of the actual world and directly related to the realm of human affairs. The term is equally well understood, however, in the sense of its classical origin, as an historia, a narrative of any sort with no stipulation about its factuality or fictionality (as in the modern French histoire). Indeed, a work promising to be “marvelous,” “wonderful,” and “incredible,” particularly in sixteenth-century parlance, would have little to do with our everyday, mundane experience. So the ambiguous term “history” signifies a setting in Baldwin's London, but also the possibility of a fictional space that may be counterposed against it. To further the expectation of fiction, the book promises to be “very pleasant and merry to read,” a purveyor of enjoyment calculated to entertain. Missing from the title page, significantly, is any indication of the author's name. For information about him, the reader must turn the page and move into the subsequent and even more complicated framing device of the dedicatory epistle.

This second narrative component, an ostensibly typical letter of dedication, is signed only with the initials “G. B.,” which may be readily expanded to Gulielmus Baldwin. Baldwin makes a feint at the conventional appeal of author to patron, addressing himself to the courtier John Young, but he foregoes the usual request for patronage. Instead, Baldwin uses the letter to weave the premise of Beware the Cat into a careful patchwork of actual and fictional details that contribute verisimilitude to the narrative's setting. Specifically, the dedication introduces Master Streamer in association with several well-known historical personages: George Ferrers (who occasionally served Edward VI as Master of Pastimes from 1551 to 1553), Thomas Willot (sub-almoner to the king and astrologer to Ferrers), and Baldwin himself. Gregory Streamer, however, is a fictitious invention conceived by Baldwin, with a name suggesting both the volubility of his talk and its tendency to meander over the textual landscape. By linking Streamer so closely to actual attendants at court, Baldwin introduces his protagonist under the guise of objective history; he frames a fictional character within an actual setting and, conversely, imports actual persons into the world of his fiction. From the perspective of the contemporary reader, each courtier, as a participant, could serve as an eyewitness capable of corroborating the conversation that fancifully took place on the given evening.

In a further mediation within the dedicatory epistle, Baldwin employs a device utilized by Thomas More in the overwrought letter to Peter Giles prefacing Utopia. There, with tongue unmistakably in cheek, More requests that Giles check with Raphael Hythloday, an obviously fictitious character, to verify the width of the Anhydrous River.⁸ Similarly, Baldwin requests that Young present his manuscript to Streamer and “learn his mind herein, and if he agree it pass in such sort, yet that he peruse it before the printing and amend it if in any point I have mistaken him”(3). Interestingly, Baldwin is differing Young a preliminary, alterable manuscript, not the final text, a detail that furthers the pretense of a train of events involving Streamer's participation in Baldwin's world. The effect of all this play, suggesting that the fictitious Streamer is an actual person, erodes the demarcation between the fictional and the actual.

This licensed crossing back and forth between the fictional space and the actual world requires a distinction between Baldwin-the-author, who lived in fact, and Baldwin-the-character, who lives only in the world of his fiction.⁹ The former, or “Baldwin,” as I shall call him, is the sixteenth-century Londoner who wrote Beware the Cat and edited A Mirrour for Magistrates. This person doubtless knew Masters Ferrers and Willot at the court of Edward VI. In contrast, Baldwin-the-character, nominated in the text only as “G. B.,” is a constructed character. G. B. claims personal acquaintance with the fictitious Streamer and in this way reveals himself to be no more than a fictional surrogate for the actual Baldwin. Yet in the dedicatory epistle—and, as we shall see, in the argument, the gloss, and the final exhortation—G. B. speaks from a position of historical actuality, framing himself and the occasion of Streamer's oration with detailed specificity and verisimilitude.

For this reason, the distinction between “Baldwin” and “G. B.” is crucial. Beware the Cat's successive frames constantly entice the reader to forget the ever-increasing distance between fiction and actuality, as if a single, historically present narrator composed all components of the book. The narrative, however, never comes to rest in a single voice: authority resides sometimes in Baldwin, sometimes in the persona G. B., sometimes in the fictional Streamer, and sometimes in a dynamic tension among them, a tension contrived within framing elements of purported actual occurrence.

Owing to this multivalence in narrative authority, the dedicatory epistle also raises questions about who will perform the activities commonly expected of the author-function: writing, editing, arranging, explaining, and entitling the artifact of the book. Tasks usually undertaken by a single author are here shared among Baldwin, G. B., and Streamer. Baldwin, of course, after the title page, immediately gives way to G. B., who claims in the dedicatory letter to be a mere reporter, an amanuensis recording verbatim a narrative that originated with Streamer:

I so nearly used both the order and words of him that spake them (which is not the least virtue of a reporter) that I doubt not but that he [Ferrers] and Master Willot shall in the reading think they hear Master Streamer speak, and he himself in the like action shall doubt whether he speaketh or readeth.

(3)

G. B.'s assurance that he played no part in the choice of vocabulary or syntax is reinforced by the promise that Ferrers and Willot will confirm the distinct narrative voice as that of Streamer, who would himself concur.

On the other hand, G. B. admits to playing an active role in preparation of the text, one that assumes increasing weight as the text unfolds. Focusing on Streamer's oration, he acknowledges a great deal of editorial meddling:

I have divided his oration into three parts, and set the argument before them and an instruction after them, with such notes as might be gathered thereof, so making it booklike, and entitled Beware the Cat.

(3)

In many ways, then, G. B. is responsible for the format of Beware the Cat, if not for creating all of its language or content. He is situated not only as a reporter, but also as an editor of a previously produced text. Moreover, as an author, G. B. composes the letter of dedication, the prefatory argument, the marginal gloss, and the concluding exhortation. His purpose, he claims, is to make Streamer's oral discourse more “booklike,” and, toward this end, his presence—as reporter, editor, or author—is manifest on every page of the volume. G. B.'s equivocation between being an author of sorts and yet a deferent scribe need not be slighted as “repeated contradictions.”¹⁰ Rather, like every aspect of this dedicatory epistle, such expedient details frame Streamer's impending oratory, positioning him simultaneously in the actual and fictional worlds.

“The Argument” supplied by G. B. provides yet another narrative grounded in particulars of place and time that, if true, could be confirmed by any number o sources in sixteenth-century London. “It chanced that at Christmas last I was at Court,” he begins, setting a fictional scene at a certifiably real location (5). Similarly, as G. B. introduces the dispute that arose between Streamer and himself in Master Ferrers's bedchamber (that is, “whether birds and beasts had reason”), he pinpoints an actual date for the conversation, “which I think was the twenty-eight of December” (5). When Streamer finally speaks in his own voice, making his dubious claim to understand the conversation of beasts, G. B. immediately frames him by recalling the imputed actuality of the scene, confirmed by the presence of Ferrers and represented by the interaction of those involved.

“Yea,” quoth he, “I have heard them [animals] and understand them both speak and reason as well as I hear and understand you.”

At this Master Ferrers laughed.

(6)

The ease with which this fictitious character mixes with the historical persons imported into the scene attests to the continued mediation between the world of the fiction and the world of actuality.

The Argument thus introduces the topic for debate in Beware the Cat, wherein Streamer argues “that beasts and fowls had reason, and that as much as men, yea, and in some points more” (6). For his part, G. B. holds that artistic representations of animals ought not to wrench the examples of nature to the uses of comedy (5). Although several critics view this exchange as a ridiculous parody of scholarly debates in general, the question of whether animals enjoy reason had long provided stimulation for both philosophical and literary imaginations, dating at least from Plutarch's well-known dialogue on the topic.¹¹ During the Italian Renaissance the topic received extended treatment in Giovanni Battista Gelli's La Circe (1548), which retells the encounter of Odysseus with the enchantress who could transform men into brutes.¹² In England the topic found expression, among other places, at the end of Book 2 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, when Sir Guyon and the Palmer encounter in the Bower of Bliss the “seeming beasts” entranced by Acrasia, one of whom in particular, the infamous Grill, chooses to remain “a beast, and lacke intelligence” (2.12.87). The topic of Master Streamer's discourse, then, points to an intertextual exchange in which Beware the Cat promises to participate.

Yet ultimately Beware the Cat will offer no resolution of the question raised by this topic, because Streamer's discourse, which begins earnestly enough, in the end fails to offer any serious comment upon it. Instead, the lesson to be gained, “that cats do understand us and mark our secret doings”(54), relies heavily upon the overly moral interpretation provided in the Exhortation by G. B., whose final position, as we shall see, becomes highly suspect. Once he turns to Streamer's series of tales, G. B. quickly forgets the original topic of discussion, submits to his companion's fascinating narrative, and follows the wanderings of Streamer's oration without question.

Coming on the heels of the Argument, Master Streamer's oration and G. B.'s marginal gloss comprise the largest component(s) of Beware the Cat. This dual compound of textual elements presents G. B.'s extensive annotation in tandem with Streamer's performance, although in terms of the purported chronology of the work's composition, Streamer's oration must have preceded G. B.'s commentary. As a unit previously framed and anticipated by the prefatory elements noted above, Streamer's narrative and its gloss serve as the raison d'etre of Baldwin's work.

In the learned tradition of sidenotes that elucidate and summarize a main argument, G. B.'s gloss appears in the margins of Streamer's narrative and literally frames it, conceptually as well as visually. As G. B. asserted in the dedicatory epistle, he wants to make Streamer's oration more “booklike”—that is, to transform an oral discourse into writing and identify it as a volume worthy of respect and credence.¹³ Generally, the dialectic between text and commentary activated by a marginal gloss reflects the growing willingness among Renaissance readers to engage and interrogate ecclesiastical as well as literary authorities previously held inviolate. As a narrative strategy in fiction, the gloss was useful for initiating an internal dialogue that complicated facile reading.¹⁴ While a gloss could assume many possible functions, amplification, explication, evaluation, and exhortation were among the most frequent.¹⁵

In “Master Streamer's Oration,” as in other texts with marginalia, the reader must decide what relation the sidenotes bear to the host text. For Beware the Cat this task is especially problematical, because G. B.'s gloss, which ought to offer perceptive commentary and insight into an antecedent text, is fraught with clichés, platitudes, and truisms, so that its usefulness is blunted. Sometimes it is reductive, at other times it misguidedly moralizes, and on yet other occasions it simply misreads the host text. The sooner we as readers perceive this strange discord, the sooner we realize that the gloss is not to be taken at face value.

Confronted with an unstable dialectic between G. B.'s gloss and Streamer's narrative, the reader must consider various possibilities of explaining the gloss's disjunctions. Among them, for example, do we assume that the gloss communicates the views of a discerning and wise G. B., cooly gleaning the best he can from a pompous and foolish oration? Or could it be that the odd aberrations in the gloss amount to a condescending gesture by G. B. to patronize a poorly read audience? Or perhaps—and this is the possibility I want to pursue further—is the gloss a sincere but failed attempt by a moralizing but less astute G. B. to interpret Streamer's rambunctious narrative? By all accounts, the gloss and its host text are poorly suited to one another, so at the least we find G. B. unreliable as a reader. But if we push this unreliability further, we can reasonably question the dependability of the entire gloss—and, by extension, of the volume as a whole, since G. B. claims to have assembled it. The gloss is self-subverting in that G. B., the imputed author, deconstructs his own authority. If this is so, then the relationship between gloss and host text figures not only a parodic undercutting of glossing in general, but also a subtle maneuver by Baldwin to “frame” his volume in the modern slang sense of exposing its chicanery and duplicity. But just how does this dynamic play out in the reader's experience of the text?

The first part of Master Streamer's oration begins in a rather serious vein, probably owing something to the format of the Socratic dialogue, since the conversation between Streamer and four interlocutors proceeds with reasonable order and decorum. The tone of the first several paragraphs is light but rational (if only ironically so), and the marginalia that extract lessons from the host narrative do not seem out of place. As Streamer begins his talk with a lengthy digression on the gates in London's city walls, the loss studiously documents his progress from Aldersgate to Moorgate to Newgate, and so forth. When Streamer,

cleric, condemns the dearth of studiousness among the youth of London, the gloss echoes his homily: “Against young men's negligence” and “Against unlawful games.”

(9-10)

But even here in Streamer's opening sentences we encounter a hermeneutical problem. As Ringler points out, Streamer's explanations of the names of London's gates “have little or no basis in fact” (59). Presumably, the educated among Streamer's audience (and Baldwin's readers) would recognize his fabulation and be amused by it, while others, unfamiliar with London or unaccustomed to such narrative tomfoolery, would be neither informed nor entertained. Perhaps we should establish a distinction between two possible audiences: one that enjoys no sensitivity to such narrative strategy, and a second, more discerning group, fully aware of Streamer's made-up details. Yet in his pious summaries of Streamer's explanations, G. B. shows no signs of such awareness, a deficiency that would locate him among the naive bumpkins.

In the second part of Streamer's oration, the story becomes more humorously idiosyncratic, forsaking the logical question-and-answer of the previous conversation and instead romping through the al-chemical recipes of Albertus Magnus. It allows Streamer to include more personal particulars and more comical anecdotes from his own experience, adding lively details to his already distinct personality. In this section, however, the attentive reader may once again question the perspective of G. B.'s gloss. While it is reliable enough to note that Streamer confuses astrological planetary time and conventional solar time (28), it nonetheless silently passes over the obvious humor in Streamer's tale or attempts to counteract it with moralistic aphorisms.

For example, when Streamer goes to St. John's Wood in search of the necessary ingredients for his noxious concoction of lozenges, he collects several animals from a group of hunters:

THE LIBERALITY OF HUNTERS

I met with hunters who had that morning killed a fox and three hares, who (I thank them) gave me an hare and the fox's whole body (except the case) and six smart lashes with a slip, because (wherein I did mean no harm) I asked them if they had seen anywhere an hedgehog that morning.

(26)

The humor here, of course, derives from the “liberality” of the hunters, reflected equally in their gifts and their lashes. Yet the gloss, in a carefully calculated ambiguity, fails to specify which sense is to be applied. Certainly G. B., whom I relegated to the naive readers, has not hitherto employed humor in his marginalia, and it seems unlikely that he would do so here, even in response to the rising ribaldry of Streamer's talk.

But if the tone of this gloss is ambiguous, later instances clearly indicate that G. B. is either indifferent to the comedy in Streamer's oration or altogether oblivious to it. As Streamer feeds one of his lozenges to “a shrewd boy, a very crack-rope,” and the urchin sputters, “By God's bones, it is a cat's turd,” the gloss has nothing more relevant to offer than “Strange things are delectable” (30). At this point, the text and its gloss are so at odds that the disparity is inescapable. Does G. B. deliberately intend to suggest in this sidenote that the boy is mistaken and cat turds are actually quite tasty? Not likely. A better explanation is that G. B. has either misinterpreted Streamer or ridiculously misstated himself. Moreover, the marginalium occurs within a progressive heightening of irony in the gloss, which culminates in the final segment of Streamer's performance.

By the third part of Master Streamer's oration, G. B.'s gloss obstinately fails to share in the mirth of Streamer's observations. For example, as the cat known as Mouse-slayer defends her life by describing the many jests she has perpetrated on humans, she tells how her dame fed her mustard and blew pepper up her nose to give her the pitiful appearance of sneezing and tears. Rather than attend to the comedy of the scene, however, the gloss stoically reports: “Mustard purgeth the head and pepper maketh one neese” (41). When Streamer reports one of the most hilarious of Mouse-slayer's tales—she sinks her claws and then her teeth into an adulterer's buttocks and genitals, while he for safety's sake must remain silent to escape the wrath of the husband—the gloss first makes the circumspect observation that “Fear overcometh smart,” followed by the sanctimonious assertion, “It is justice to punish those parts that offend” (50). By now, however, the gloss by its piety has so markedly distanced itself from Streamer's oration that it signals its independence, displaying an otherness in contradistinction to the narrative from which it attempts to extract moral dicta. It calls attention to itself as a separate entity and flaunts the way it no longer agrees with its parallel text. Of course, the gloss itself has not changed; rather, G. B. has maintained a straight face, while Streamer, to the amusement of his audience, has gradually degraded both the subject matter and the tone of his performance.

Exploring the process of signification in Beware the Cat is especially rewarding because the relationship between gloss and host text is so clearly unstable. Paradoxically, the relationship between these two semiotic systems is—to use Saussurian terminology—both syntagmatic and associative.¹⁶ In that G. B. admits to having added such notes as might be gleaned from the lessons of Streamer's anterior text, he implies that the two systems inhere within a syntagmatic relationship. That is, Streamer's text is a source narrative for the supplemental gloss. Because the gloss is subordinated to and read after the text, the gloss exists as a marginal entity defined as an other to the text. Its marginality, of course, is further indicated by the spatial arrangement of both systems on the printed page. There is something first and something later, a hierarchy of signifying systems operating within both space and time.

However, if the reader realizes that the dedicatory letter and the Argument are fictional frames (as most literate readers then and now may be expected to do), and that, similarly, Streamer's oration and G. B.'s gloss are egalitarian fictions, both created by Baldwin, no reason exists to read a source narrative in the “former” and a secondary supplement in the “latter.” There is no hierarchy of what comes first and what comes after. Neither system is privileged. The texts therefore become associative, providing the reader with a choice of possible meanings within a range of paradigmatic options.

Under these conditions, although at first glance G. B.'s gloss may appear to be a supplement to Streamer's oration, the reverse is also possible. Streamer's oration may just as feasibly be subordinated to the sidenotes, making G. B.'s gloss the main narrative, in which case Streamer's coarse humor becomes ancillary to a serious moral message. In such a deconstruction of textual privilege and hierarchy, neither semiotic system is more “true” or more “right,” nor can either be said to frame the other, unless it be granted that the opposite might also occur. When we as readers discover this playful relationship between Streamer's oration and G. B.'s gloss, we arrive at the deconstructive moment. We perceive that the entire series of frames—including the construction of G. B. and Streamer as surrogate narrators—is fiction. The reader penetrates frame after frame, delving deeper into Baldwin's text, only to find at its core an unstable relationship between two semantic systems, each struggling to frame the other. The “center” of Beware the Cat offers not stability, but only two more would-be frames, confronting and interrogating each other.

At the end of Streamer's oration and G. B.'s gloss, after the joking and jesting are finished, the fictional frames of the narrative are recalled in the reverse order of their original appearance. Mouse-slayer ends her self-defense; Streamer concludes his eavesdropping on the animals and goes to sleep, thereby ending his tale of cats and returning to the putative reality of Ferrers's bedchamber; and G. B. ends his record of that strange evening. By the time G. B. begins his final activity, the Exhortation, he has withdrawn from the world of the fiction and addresses the reader directly as though they both had just attended a prolonged Tudor sermon.

Significantly, however, G. B. undertakes at his exit the same sort of mediation between the actual and fictional worlds that facilitated his entry, recounting for the reader the lifelike details that comprise the metafictional bridge:

I know these things will seem marvelous to many men, that cats should understand and speak, have a governor among themselves, and be obedient to their laws. And were it not for the approved authority of the ecstatical author of whom I heard it, I should myself be as doubtful as they. But seeing I know the place and the persons with whom he talked of these matters … I am the less doubtful of any truth therein.

(54)

Once again, G. B. brings the actual world of London to bear upon the fictional space of the text: “I know the place and the persons with whom he talked of these matters.” G. B. reminds his readers of Ferrers and Willot, in the bedchamber, at King Edward's Court, on December 28, and of the possibility of corroborating everything Streamer has said.

The Exhortation, like the title page, confronts the reader with signals of genre, but this time with forceful didactic intent. Although the title page proclaimed Beware the Cat to be “marvelous” and pleasantly “incredible,” the Exhortation desires “that we may take profit by this declaration of Master Streamer” (54). The work fulfills the dual requirements of the humanistic aesthetic, most concisely set forth by Horace, “aut prodesse … aut delectare,” or, to use Philip Sidney's formulation, “to teach and delight.”¹⁷ And just to make sure the homiletic point hits home, the Exhortation is followed by a solemn Hymn. That this final song was reportedly composed by Streamer provides Beware the Cat with its final frame, one last reminder of “the approved authority of the ecstatical author.”

Only recently has Beware the Cat sustained the attention of scholars, and perhaps William Baldwin is better known as editor of the remarkably popular Mirrour for Magistrates (1559).¹⁸ Tellingly, in that work also we find a series of framing devices similar to those noted in Beware the Cat—not only enveloping the text as a whole but also marking the entrance and exit to each of the work's verse monologues. In the process Baldwin once again creates a fictional space for his cavalcade of Fortune's victims and adopts a narrative strategy that connects their imagined situations to the actual world of contemporary England.

For example, in a pointed dedication “To the nobilitye and all other in office,” Baldwin establishes A Mirrour for Magistrates as a weightier work than Beware the Cat (63-67). He follows this address with a separate memorial to those who have suffered at the hands of Fortune, the subjects of the following narratives. And then, just as Baldwin gave way to G. B., his narrative persona in Beware the Cat, Baldwin introduces a persona of himself in a similarly fictional scene. Here he recounts the origin of A Mirrour for Magistrates and the part played by his fellow contributors as well as himself. With a profession of more than the usual authorial modesty, Baldwin confesses that composing so serious a tome “was a matter passyng my wyt and skyll”; nonetheless, he and the other “dyuers learned men … were throughe a generall assent at an apoynted time and place gathered together to deuyse therupon” (68-69). As in Beware the Cat, Baldwin takes pains to establish a realistic setting, “at an appointed time and place,” replete with details imported from the actual world, including the presence (among others) of Master Ferrers.

This introduction, then, stages a scene in which the authors of the components of A Mirrour for Magistrates assemble to discuss their sources and read their work to one another. As they proceed, monologue by monologue, Baldwin frames their individual performances with prose transitions that situate each one within the actual world. Some of these links are more fully realized than others, but all achieve a degree of verisimilitude. Baldwin's transition from the monologue of Jack Cade to that of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, is among the most inventive:

Whyle he [an unnamed contributor] was deuisyng thereon, and every man seking farder notes, I looked on the Cronicles, and fynding styl fyelde vpon fyelde, & manye noble men slayne, I purposed to haue ouerpassed all, for I was so wearye that I waxed drowsye, and began in dede to slumber: but my imaginacion styll prosecutyng this tragicall matter, brought me suche a fantasy. Me thought there stode before vs, a tall mans body full of fresshe woundes, but lackyng a head, holdying by the hande a goodlye childe, whose brest was so wounded that his hearte myght be seen. … And whan through the gastfulnes of this pyteous spectacle, I waxed afeard, and turned awaye my face, me thought there came a shrekyng voyce out of the weasande pipe of the headles bodye, saying as foloweth.

(181)

In the invention of his dream, Saldwin devises an effective mediation between the actuality of his fellow contributors and the grotesque, visionary world of Richard Plantagenet. The disparate contents of A Mirrour for Magistrates and its large number of incidental dark and admonitory tales call for an encompassing frame to organize the multeity of its texts into an integrated artifact.

The frames of A Mirrour for Magistrates and Beware the Cat accomplish much the same purpose. They import details about persons and places from the actual world into a fiction, or, conversely, they situate fictional events and characters within plausible historical circumstances. In both works the strategy succeeds in framing outlandish or episodic narratives with realistic details from the known world of human experience. Furthermore, in Beware the Cat the construction of the platitudinous G. B. and his inappropriate gloss legitimizes what might otherwise be condemned as a series of immoral tales. While the gloss deconstructs G. B.'s overall narrative authority, as well as its own reliability, it provides a range of hermeneutic options that precludes simplistic declarations of static meaning.

Such instability, however, tenuous and shifty as it may be, does not dissolve the text into meaningless, a historical, apolitical indeterminacy. Baldwin's work, after all, yields a fruitful cornucopia of anti-Catholic propaganda and, in spite of itself, even a modest contribution to philosophical, theological, and doctrinal debates. The text resides snugly within the conditions that prevailed at the time of its production. When situating the work in relation to its culture, though, critics should give credit to the text's authorial ambiguity. The tension between its hilarity and its modesty must be recognized. Baldwin's work, like a homiletic sermon, exhibits purposeful didacticism, but it goes about its agenda in a far more sophisticated way, engaging the reader in an ultimately more complex learning process.

While the use of framing devices in English literature does not originate with Baldwin, he nevertheless puts such devices to better use than any of his contemporaries. Regardless of its position in Tudor history or in the literary canon, however, Beware the Cat deserves careful attention because of its narrative strategy. Baldwin's work anticipates subsequent forms of experimentation in prose fiction, an experimentation in the creation of alternative realities that eventuates in the English novel.¹⁹

Notes

1. Baldwin may have composed Beware the Cat as early as 1553, but no manuscripts survive. No printed text appeared until 1570, when John Allde and William Gryffith published separate editions. A slightly emended edition was published by Allde's son in 1584. The illustration to which I refer is known from a single four-leaf fragment of the Gryffith edition (STC 1244), housed in the British Library. No modern edition appeared until William P. Holden, ed., Beware the Cat and The Funerals of King Edward the Sixth, By William Baldwin, Connecticut College Monograph 8 (New London, CT: Connecticut College, 1963). A more recent text with scholarly apparatus was prepared by William A. Ringler, Jr., and Michael Flachmann, Beware the Cat, By William Baldwin: The First English Novel (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1988). For a comprehensive review of textual matters, see Ringler and Flachmann xxix-xxx. All citations of Beware the Cat and of Ringler and Flachmann's annotations refer to this volume.

2. The 1584 edition inserts a poem, “T. K. to the Reader,” before the dedicatory letter (Ringler and Flachmann 1-2). Since the poem is a later addition and not by Baldwin, however, I omit it from this consideration of the author's narrative strategy.

3. See S. K. Heninger, Jr., “Alberti's Window: The Rhetoric of Perspective,” Proportion Poetical: The Subtext of Form in the English Renaissance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).

4. Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 116.

5. Ringler and Flachmann xxi; Gresham, “William Baldwin: Literary Voice of the Reign of Edward VI,” HLQ 44 (1981): 113. Both Ringler and Gresham provide excellent surveys of Baldwin's life and works.

6. English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 360.

7. “The Production and Communication of Knowledge in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat: Toward a Typographic Culture,” Criticism 33 (1991): 1-29.

8. “I most earnestly desire you, friend Peter, to talk with Hythloday, if you can, face to face, … and so to work in this matter that in this my book there may neither anything be found which is untrue, neither anything be lacking which is true. And I think verily it shall be well done that you shew unto him the book itself. For if I have missed or failed in any point, or if any fault have escaped me, no man can so well correct and amend it as he …” (Utopia, trans. Ralph Robinson [1551] ed. Richard Marius [London: Dent, 1985], 9).

9. King likewise distinguishes between the actual Baldwin and a persona (389ff.)

10. Nancy A. Gutierrez, “Beware the Cat: Mimesis in a Skin of Oratory,” Style 23 (1989): 55.

11. “Beasts Are Rational,” Moralia 985D-992E.

12. Homer, Odyssey 10.210-43. Henry Iden translated Gelli's work as Circes of John Baptista Gello (London, 1557).

13. The marginal gloss made Renaissance books more appealing to a new audience, a largely lay population interested in literary products but unfamiliar with practices hitherto observed only by clerical scholars; see William W. E. Slights, “The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books,” RenQ 42 (1989): 682-716.

14. In his reading of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar, for example, Slights finds “a gloss struggling to deny easy referentiality, blocking what might be called one-way reading, and doing so not out of ineptitude but out of careful design” (707).

15. Slights 685-86.

16. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye with Albert Riedlinger, trans. Roy Harris (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986), 118-21.

17. Horace, Ars Poetica 478; Sidney, A Defense of Poetry, in Katherine Duncan-Jones and Jan van Dorsten, eds., Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 80.

18. The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938). Subsequent citations to this work will be given parenthetically in the text.

19. An earlier, shorter version of this essay was presented at the 1992 English Renaissance Prose Conference, October 16-17, at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana.