SOURCE: Gutierrez, Nancy C. “Beware the Cat: Mimesis in a Skin of Oratory.” Style 23, no. 1 (spring 1989): 49-69.

[In the following excerpt, Gutierrez asserts that Beware the Cat articulates the humanist theory that a text is not just a product of its author but an experience of reading that serves to create a more moral reader.]

In a ballad entitled “A shorte Answere to the boke called: Beware the Cat” (pub c. 1570), the anonymous poet derides William Baldwin's piece of short fiction, published in 1570, as a misrepresentation of the truth: “Every thing almost: in that boke is as tru / As that at midsomer” (Holden 94). The poet's confident and condescending exposé of Baldwin's apparent chicanery loses its bite, however, when one realizes that Beware the Cat is a rhetorical tour de force which depends on the reader's ability to grasp not only the fictive nature of the contents, but also the rationale behind presenting the account as true. With hindsight, one might say that this early misreading of Baldwin's text foreshadows its future obscurity, for Beware the Cat (comp. 1553) holds only a marginal place in the history of English prose fiction.¹

One reason for this lack of valuation both in 1570 and later may be due to its culture-specific grounding in one of humanism's most demanding theories: according to Renaissance critical theory, a text was not merely a product crafted by the author, but an experience—the experience of reading—through which process the reader would be persuaded to ethical activity that would irrevocably change his moral life.² Because reader-response criticism has only recently entered mainstream literary theory (although the awareness of the reader was never totally submerged in critical commentary and certainly was prominently displayed in many literary works over the past four centuries), this Renaissance attitude toward reading—and, by extension, composition—is really just beginning to be addressed by modern scholars.³ Texts that are intrinsically rhetorical objects, like Beware the Cat, now have a vocabulary with which to describe their workings, and consequently their literary and historical importance.

Beware the Cat deserves to take its place in literary history as the first piece of original prose fiction (Ringler 113) for both aesthetic as well as historical reasons. While William A. Ringler, Jr., and Stephen Gresham have pointed out the narrative complexity of the work, and John N. King and Arthur Kinney in different ways have placed it in a strong tradition of English Reformation literature,⁴ no critic has specifically examined how the experience of reading Beware the Cat creates its meaning both morally and aesthetically. In the following discussion, I will focus first on the humanist tradition in which Baldwin is working and, second, on the actual experience of reading Beware the Cat.⁵ From this analysis, it will be possible to come to some conclusions about how Beware the Cat is both product and shaper of its historical milieu.

I

A brief description exemplifies the narrative complexity of the work. Ostensibly a satire on superstition in general and Roman Catholicism in particular, Beware the Cat also questions how man knows what he knows. The narrative itself is not straightforward, but unfolds in an internesting of actions. The core of the book, an “oration” by a Master Gregory Streamer, is framed on either end by poems, dedicatory letters, and other extraneous pieces, a format similar to many learned humanist products. This framing material contributes to the satire as the narrative reveals that Streamer is arguing the ridiculous notion that animals can reason. G. B., William Baldwin, reveals himself in the prefatory pieces as the recorder, not the author, of the text. He had heard the story the previous Christmas (1552-53) at Court, where he had been the assistant of George Ferrers, master of King Edward's revels. They had shared sleeping quarters with Master Willot, an astronomer, and Streamer, a divine. (Both Baldwin and Ferrers are historical figures; Willot and Streamer apparently are fictional, although Ringler and Flachmann point out that these names “appear obscurely in contemporary records” [xxii; see also 58]). One night, while discussing the proper decorum to be shown by animals in dramatic pieces, the men began to argue about whether or not animals could actually reason. G. B. argued that they could not, and he used as his evidence the authority of learned philosophers; Streamer argued that they indeed had reason, and his authority was based on analogy and, even more importantly, on his own experience. He agreed to tell his story only if his audience promised not to interrupt. In G. B.'s “transcribed” account, Streamer described how he was persuaded that animals could talk by a conversation he had had with several other men and how he concocted a magic potion that enabled him to understand the speech of cats beneath his London window.

A mixture of literary kinds, a characteristic mark of satire (Heiserman 165; King 387), makes up the narrative in Beware the Cat: fantastic genres, such as the beast fable and the dream vision, coexist with the textbook-like medical treatise, the sententious proverb, and petitionary hymn. The container for these multitudinous and diverse genres is “Streamers oration,” oratory, a literature of statement, not of the imagination. And further, within this overarching oratorical genre, various personae take the orator's soapbox: G. B. in the prefatory material, his fictional creation Streamer, various servants, distant figures of the past, as well as cats themselves. In each case, the speaker tells a story as proof that his particular point of view is valid. This confrontation of imaginative discourse (story) with its rhetorical framework (oratory) is the source of power in the work: mimesis is enveloped in a skin of oratory.

The purpose behind such multiple and diverse rhetorical stances is to put into practice humanism's central tenet that literature teaches virtuous action or, more precisely, that the act of reading properly demands the same kind of intellectual and moral understanding as does the act of living ethically. In both cases, right reading and right action are realized only by continuous exercise of these activities, for ethics is not a study (or way of life) apprehended in stasis. The Renaissance's conception of reading and interpreting as ethical activities means that a text is not a product, but a process: “a text is valuable insofar as it engages the reader in an activity of discrimination and thereby educates the faculty of practical reason or prudential judgment which is essential to the active life” (Kahn, Rhetoric 11). In essence, this means that a text is defined by the rhetorical interdependence and interaction of reader, subject, and strategy. The rhetorical tension between and among the various speakers, and especially between Streamer's authority and his obvious folly in Beware the Cat, is the strategy by which the reader comes to read, interpret, and finally act in an ethical manner. The reader is needed to “complete” the text, both in its individual parts and its whole.⁶

The importance placed on right reading by humanist educators and philosophers seems to have its seed in Plutarch's essay, “How a yoong man ought to heare poets, and how he may take profit by reading poemes,” a work well-known to English humanists from the fifteenth century onward (Atkins 14, 27, 100-01).⁷ In this essay, Plutarch advocates not merely noting good examples to emulate and bad examples to avoid, but also the important need for discrimination on the part of the reader in order to recognize which was which. This idea was given currency in the early part of the century most particularly by Thomas Elyot both in his translation of Plutarch's The Education of Bringinge vp of Children (printed before June 1530) and in his The Book Named the Governor (1532). I quote in full the following passage from the Governor, for it demonstrates the three important aspects of Plutarch's theory of reading:

[S]ince good and wise matter may be picked out of these poets, it were no reason for some light matter that is in their verses to abandon therefore all their works, no more than it were to forbear or prohibit a man to come into a fair garden lest the redolent savours of sweet herbs and flowers shall move him to wanton courage, or lest in gathering good and wholesome herbs he may happen to be stung with a nettle. No wise man entereth into a garden but he soon espieth good herbs from nettles, and treadeth the nettles under his feet whiles he gathereth good herbs, whereby he taketh no damage, or if he be stung he maketh light of it and shortly forgetteth it. Semblably if he do read wanton matter mixed with wisdom, he putteth the worst under foot and sorteth out the best, or if his courage be stirred or provoked, he remembereth the little pleasure and great detriment that should ensue of it, and withdrawing his mind to some other study or exercise shortly forgetteth it.

(49)

In this passage, Elyot emphasizes the importance of discrimination in sorting out the examples to follow and the examples to forget. He also equates right reading with morality since goodness and wisdom are portrayed as interchangeable, and thus implies that “wantonness” and ignorance are likewise. Finally, Elyot's metaphor itself demonstrates the idea that poetry is process, not product: he describes the activity of enjoying a garden, not the garden itself, and this activity requires a fully engaged participant.

This humanist insistence on the active involvement of the reader with and within a text may seem to reduce, if not eliminate, its mimetic power. However, this is not the case; the mimetic power has merely shifted its point of reference. In his book on Renaissance dialogue, K. J. Wilson points out that two separate ideas of mimesis descend from the theories of Aristotle and Plato (1-21). For Aristotle, poetic art is the imitation of human action. Plato recognizes another valid aesthetic mimesis, “the imitation of an idea in the creative mind” (Wilson 8). Usually differentiated as mimetic and didactic impulses, these both are intrinsically imitative, although the aesthetic effect is obviously different since the objects of imitation differ. If in the former, the operation of imitation may best be charted between the world and the text, in the latter, the operation is between the text and the reader. Consequently, the process of writing is a mimetic act, an imitation of thinking; likewise the product itself is a mimesis of thought. This platonic understanding of mimesis was the basis, in earlier ages, for the linking of the physical object of the book with human cognition. By extension, reading and interpreting are also a kind of mimesis, as the reader reconstructs a picture of what he has read in his mind (Curtius 302-47; cf. Cave). It is this kind of mimesis that operates in Beware the Cat, for the core of the narrative, the apparent imitation of the world, is filtered through a series of readers before it reaches us, the final readers of the text.

This particular kind of reader involvement clarifies the satiric tradition in which Beware the Cat is operating and, at the same time, demonstrates the most effective critical perspective with which to analyze the work. Beware the Cat asks us to focus not on the mixture of genres as the primary generic touchstone, but instead on the variety of orators and their effect(s) on the reader.⁸ Such a reshifting of perspective brings to the foreground the popular humanist forms of dialogue and declamation, the coalescing of which we find in Beware the Cat.

The external structure of Beware the Cat signals that it is a dialogue. According to humanist practice, dialogue shows the give and take of two sides of a question, usually a philosophical or moral problem, each side represented by two or more characters: in Baldwin's work, Streamer and Baldwin represent opposite sides of the question. The meaning of a dialogue normally results from the process of reasoning that occurs: either one side persuades the other that its stance is more valid, or, in some cases, the ending is open-ended and ambiguous, forcing the reader himself into judging the validity and meaning of the arguments. At the end of Streamer's oration, Baldwin appears to have accepted the divine's thesis. The strictest rules for organizing a dialogue divide it into two parts: the “vestibule serves to introduce the contention and comprises everything that precedes it”; and the “contention, the dialectical discussion proper, [is] so designed as to induce the reader to assent to the truth of the proposition” (Deakins 12).

In Beware the Cat, the vestibule is “The Argument,” which introduces the characters, sets the place for the dispute, and presents the proposition that animals can reason. “Streamers oration” is the contention, the proof of the proposition.⁹

While the dialogue form gives Beware the Cat its structure, the declamation is responsible for its speaker and subject matter. In classical rhetoric, the declamation or paradoxical encomium was a school exercise, “usually extempore, on an assigned hypothetical case” (Charles Baldwin 67). The subject was usually trivial or ridiculous, such as the praising of a flea, and the persona of the speaker correspondingly foolish. Although Quintilian and others objected to its use “as a special, artificial composition whose purpose [was] solely to display the verbal virtuosity of the speaker” (Thompson 31; cf. Charles Baldwin 87-97, Burgess 157-66), in its use by the poet Lucian, the declamation became a wicked tool for exposing human folly. In its most precise meaning, declamation is a kind of lusus—that is, a playing—but a playing with a serious intention. Because of its meticulously logical reasoning about a ridiculous or unsuitable subject, declamation delights. Further, its intrinsic nature demands from its audience not passive acceptance of its content, but reciprocal use of the audience's own wit, by which it realizes an important truth.¹⁰

The declamation cum dialogue as a structural and rhetorical framework for satire is a common humanist form, both on the continent and in England.¹¹ The most prominent examples of this hybrid genre are Erasmus's Moriae Encomium and Thomas More's Utopia, which were both published in their first English translations within three years of the composition of Beware the Cat. In both these works, an oration is turned on its head: a comic speaker attempts to persuade his/her audience of something ridiculous. In Erasmus's Encomium, Folly, the speaker, argues in front of an academic audience that she is praiseworthy. In Utopia, Raphael Hythloday (a fictional character whose name means Healer from God, Talker of Nonsense) attempts to convince More and Peter Giles (both historic figures) that a successful commonwealth can be based on reason alone. These works and others reveal that a basic tenet in early sixteenth-century humanist letters is the importance of reader involvement in literary interpretation. It is in this tradition that Baldwin is writing, although, since he is writing in English, he cannot be sure of the sophistication of his audience's reading. Nevertheless, a competent reader is suggested by Beware the Cat's methodology.

The reader of Beware the Cat not only recognizes Baldwin's mimetic actions (the stylistic imitation of the literary form of the hybrid dialogue/declamation as well as G. B.'s response and commentary), but also practices mimesis himself as he synthesizes both Streamer's oration and G. B.'s mimesis of response by creating his own text in his mind. The structural and rhetorical framework and Baldwin's commentary each forces the reader to pay attention not to what is being said, but to how it is said. The reader learns the proper way of interpreting the world as he comes to see that Streamer fails to interpret his own world accurately. Further, the real tension between Baldwin's rhetoric of the text-as-oration and the actual text-as-book makes the reader self-conscious about the process by which he comes to understand the text. In a very real sense, the reader explodes the text that Baldwin offers him and recreates his own.

II

Close analysis of the framing materials and of key scenes in the body of Beware the Cat shows that this “new” text is realized through a variety of lusus.¹² The simplest is the “upside down world” that satire often describes: turning normal values and conventions on end and advocating their opposites. In Beware the Cat, two crucial kinds of reading processes are also demanded of the reader: first, the reader must reconcile contradictory statements (this device is primarily found in the framing materials); second, the reader must come to realize that G. B. and Streamer both are unreliable narrators, not only because of their ridiculous beliefs, but also because of the examples of reading that they offer in the text itself. These two processes may be clarified with close analysis of the framing materials in Beware the Cat, the first paragraphs of “Streamers oration” and Streamer's own description of how he reads.

On the very title page, the reader is confronted with irreconcilable terms and an enigmatic command. The full title of the work is A MARVELOVS Hystory intitulede, Beware the Cat. Conteynyng diuerse wounderfull and incredible matters. Very pleasant and mery to read. “Beware the Cat” is an imperative, a command addressed to the reading audience. What this caution means, however, is not explained; in fact, not until Baldwin's “Exhortation” at the end of the work does the title become clear: that “[one's] cat knows and will reveal [one's] most secret doings, so conduct yourself properly” (Ringler and Flachmann 57). The rest of the title is composed of self-contradictory terms: the work is a history, a word which usually suggests an account of actual occurrences, and yet the history is “marvelous” (“that which is prodigious or extravagantly improbable,” according to the OED) and contains “diuerse wounderfull and incredible matters.” These words all imply that the account is outside the normal bounds of reality, an antithetical concept to the noun “history,” which these words and phrases modify.

The two prefatory pieces following the title page, a letter to John Young and the argument, provide some information about the content and structuring of the work that follows, but more important, through a variety of literary devices and rhetorical posturing, they alert the audience that the meaning of the work resides in their own reasoning ability.¹³

The introductory letter to John Young makes the reader aware that he must be self-conscious about the process by which he approaches the text. G. B. apparently admires Master Streamer, a divine, and desires to publish as many of his works as possible. He apologizes that Master Ferrers has not written down this story for Young, since Ferrers apparently is a better stylist. However, this apology is immediately contradicted by G. B.'s assertion that he has written the story exactly as Streamer had told it the previous Christmas, reporting it so accurately that Master 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). The author reverses himself a second time, however, as he reveals that he has put his own stamp on Streamer's account: “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 book-like” (3). Baldwin's repeated self-contradictions show his inability to recognize that Streamer's orally delivered “oration” will be transformed when he presents it in written form: listening and reading are two different kinds of communication that result in two different kinds of audience experiences. In addition, G. B.'s division of the material and his scholarly additions necessarily provide a context by which the reader is directed how to understand Streamer's story, a context that was not available for Streamer's listeners.

In the last part of the letter, G. B. reveals that he is anxious to obtain Streamer's approval to print the divine's story, as well as other works of Streamer, for Streamer's “great glory, and no less pleasure to all them that desire such kinds of knowledge” (4). In other words, G. B. presents Streamer as a renowned authority, a model orator, worthy, learned, eloquent. In humanist terms, such an orator is the link between the intellect's appreciation of wisdom and its application of wisdom in ethical living.¹⁴ In rhetorical theory, the orator's reputation (or, more accurately, the impression the audience has of the orator) is one of the primary means of persuasion. Consequently, the reader should be predisposed to believe Streamer's coming oration; however, G. B.'s own conflicting statements are a check on the reader's uncritical acceptance of Streamer's eloquence.

In the next prefatory section, G. B. sets forth “The argument,” in which he introduces the characters, describes the setting, and provides the context for the coming “oration.” The title of this section, “The Argument,” is a pun, ironically describing the scientific basis for Streamer's narrative, but also suggesting the real argument in the work of reason versus superstition. More importantly, this section corresponds to the vestibule, the first section of the dialogue form. However, Baldwin disrupts the decorum that a learned Renaissance audience would expect from a conventional dialogue. Normally the setting is a kind of idyll: a garden on a spring afternoon. Here the setting is a crowded bedroom late at night in the middle of the Christmas season. Whereas the subject of discussion should be highly philosophical or moral, the topic of this discussion is patently ridiculous.

Finally, the speakers of the dialogue should have a certain stature and, while Baldwin's characters at first appear learned, Streamer reveals himself almost immediately as pompous, foolish, and egotistical. First of all, Streamer contemptuously dismisses scientific experts as “hearsay,” indicating his inability to understand reasonable proof. This is supported by his own unsound reasoning according to analogy, a kind of reasoning that is always fallacious. Further, his insistence that he must not be interrupted indicates that he does not understand how scientific “argument” works, since he refuses to allow any questioning of his findings. His own “scientific” skill is thus called into question, as is the reputation G. B. has established for him as a model orator. G. B. himself is not the uncritical admirer of Streamer that he was in the letter to Young; his stance is now that of a skeptical listener. At this point, G. B. and the reader of the work both share the same perspective on the coming oration. This violation of the decorum of the dialogue vestibule reinforces the reader's wariness that the letter to Young suggested.

In these prefatory sections, the audience must reconcile opposite terms of meaning and G. B.'s changing rhetorical stances. This complicated maneuvering is a kind of thinking dependent on “reading,” not listening. The experience of listening is more obviously time-dependent than reading: where a listener must process what he hears immediately, whether he hears correctly or not, a reader can read at his own speed, reread for understanding, and return—if he wishes—to earlier sections. Although the terminology thus far implies oral discourse with a similar audience response, Baldwin is exploiting the conventions of oral discourse in order to engage more fully his reading audience. If this is true for the prefatory material, it is even more obvious in Streamer's “oration,” the body of Beware the Cat: right understanding of Streamer's oration comes from the process of reading, not listening, of actively responding to the text, not of passively acquiescing to it.¹⁵

The first several paragraphs of “The First Part of Master Streamer's Oration” (9-10) are in some ways the most difficult passages of the entire work, for the reader must reason properly here in order to read the rest of the work correctly. … Streamer does not proceed straight-forwardly, but continuously interrupts his account with parenthetical comments and digressions so that the reader loses sight of Streamer's original idea. Also, Baldwin's sidenotes constantly distract the reader from the body of the oration. Thus the reader moves through the text distractedly, picking up fragments one at a time.

The makeup of the “oration's” first paragraph, for example, demonstrates this disconnected train of thought particularly in the choppy style of Streamer's speech. Streamer begins his account with a description of his living quarters in London, but then moves haltingly into providing the etymologies of the gates of London. His first sentence is an elaborate run-on, made up of small phrases that work against an understanding of the whole. The use of such conjunctive phrases as “So while,” “Or else,” and “For he” contribute even further to dislocation of meaning as they move the reader further and further from the beginning point of the “oration.” Streamer's convoluted style of speech along with his failure to stay on the topic nearly destroys comprehension. As other scholars have noted, this style of communication exposes Streamer's pseudolearning and his pompous character. Such a means for revealing character is only possible in a written text where disconnectedness can be visually perceived and assimilated without danger of losing the attention of the reader or irreversibly hindering comprehension. The purpose behind this discursive narration is to draw attention away from the story itself to the method by which it is told.

Understanding is further complicated by the notes printed on the margin of the paragraph. These notes superficially seem to be explanatory as the marginal notes were in Ralph Robinson's translation of More's Utopia (1551). They are the response of G. B., Streamer's audience who apparently fully accepts Streamer's story. However, the notes do not simply explain the text, but point out, by the obviousness of their content, the text's foolishness as well (i.e., “Why Moorgate, Why Newgate, Why Ludgate, etc.”). Thus they provide both an incorrect and correct audience response. Again style is more important than substance; content takes second place to structure. This narrational technique of dividing the reader's attention between text and notes and between different interpretations of the notes themselves is directly antithetical to the process of listening where understanding is dependent on a grasp of a “whole,” on the ability to connect parts of a speech or story. The physical look of the page itself … suggests choppiness, with the three groupings of text (i.e., title, marginal notes, and main text) demanding visual attention and the many punctuation marks within the main text indicating interruption of idea.

The rest of this paragraph and the next continue the choppy and digressive movement of idea. Not until the third paragraph and later does the narrative move straightforwardly. But this straightforwardness is destroyed as a series of stories are told to Streamer by characters who are second- or third-hand tellers of the events in question: subject is still secondary to method as narrative digression is replaced by increasingly remote narrative situations. In telling their stories, Streamer's companions reveal that they originally had been an audience for these tales themselves. Consequently, this first section of Streamer's oration works as a series of mirrors reflecting the rhetorical situation that initially prompted Streamer: just as Baldwin is the unbeliever who needs to be convinced that animals have reason, so Streamer was the unbeliever in a similar conversation some years earlier, and so were each of his companions. The mimesis that Baldwin has set up for his reader becomes even more complicated as this third inner narrative shows us a mimesis of an audience listening and interpreting a text (Streamer listening to the stories of his companions), and each of the stories themselves depict yet other mimesis further away in time. Streamer is convinced, along with his companions and as G. B. seems to be, that animals can reason.

The complexity of this first part of Streamer's oration is the rhetorical means by which the reading audience comes to understand how to read the work. The series of narrative situations presented to the reader, all of which illustrate an audience mishearing a text, provide exampla on how not to read Streamer's oration. The last two sections straightforwardly present, first, Streamer's successful efforts to concoct a magical potion that will allow him to understand the language of cats and, second, the history of Mousesleyer that he hears. Without the first section, the lusus in these next sections would be incomprehensible, for the reader would have no model by which to construct his response to the text. At this point, however, the reader has been taught the appropriate code by which to read and understand the text in front of him. Consequently, Streamer's oration is properly perceived by the reader as a declamation, an oration not to be taken seriously because of the foolish speaker and the lack of proper reasoning. The “education” of the reader is not completed, however, with this initial lesson of how to read. The process by which the reader comes to recognize the difficulty of exercising proper moral and intellectual judgment continues through various “mirrors” of reading provided in the body of Streamer's oration.

In the second section, the reader is challenged with a picture of a character “reading” a text, in this case, Streamer following a recipe for a potion that will allow him to understand the language of cats. Streamer's source is The Boke of Secretes of Albartus Magnus, a collection of magical superstitions, recognized even in the sixteenth century as fantasy. The recipe itself—which is for the understanding of birds, not of cats—is full of hocus pocus and mumbo jumbo. But Streamer's deliberate misreading is the real source of humor and learning.

The recipe reads as follows: “[T]ake two in thy company, and upon Simon and Jude's day early in the morning, get thee with hounds into a certain wood, and the first beast that thou meetest take, and prepare with the heart of a fox” (25). Streamer immediately follows his own lead, ignoring the recipe's instructions: he is alone, not with two companions; it is not the feast of Saints Simon and Jude (October 28); he decides to purchase the ingredients, not to go hunting. Streamer rationalizes his decision by recalling a story about three of his friends who had attempted this recipe several years earlier, “which, while they went about this hunting were so ‘fraid, whether with an evil spirit or with their own imagination [Streamer could not] tell, but home they came with their hair standing on end, and some of them have been the worse ever since, and their hounds likewise” (25). The final phrase of this sentence comes unexpectedly as the reader's attention is directed towards the experience of the men, not of their hounds (who had not been previously mentioned). This unexpectedness is not only amusing, but brings us back to the ridiculousness of Streamer's endeavor.

Although the recipe requires the first kill of any animal on the hunt, Streamer particularly wants a hedgehog. On his way to the market, he meets two hunters, who sell him a fox (which the recipe asks for) and a hare (which the recipe does not call for), and then whip him because he reveals himself as dabbling in witchcraft when he asks them about a hedgehog, an animal associated with magic. This bad experience causes Streamer to attack these people as superstitious fools at best, papists at worst, but his righteous indignation calls attention to his own folly of following a superstitious tract.

Streamer's laughable misinterpretation of every step in the process is a parody of the humanist philosophy of right reading. Two final examples underscore this folly. When he looks at the recipe, Streamer asserts that the “writing here is doubtful” (25). But the language is not at all ambiguous: Streamer is merely doing what he wants to do. Instead of using the text as a vehicle by which to measure experience and thereby come to an understanding of the truth, Streamer abandons the text entirely and relies on his own impaired judgment, a judgment which will remain impaired because it is cloistered by his own blind refusal to engage any text critically, either the book or the world. Finally, Streamer's own reading of the cats flagrantly violates the humanist idea of right reading. After taking the potion, he finds his senses so sensitive that he must block them up: he puts in his nostrils “two trochicks” and in his mouth “two lozenges,” and he stops his ears with two pillows (31). Streamer deliberately stifles his senses as a means to understanding, the obverse of the humanist proper knowing.

The book ends with two closing pieces, an exhortation in G. B.'s voice and a hymn supposedly in Streamer's voice. These shifts in voice create blanks (Wolfgang Iser's terminology) in the text that the reader must fill in, in order for the work to have meaning. After Streamer finishes his oration, G. B. does not return to the bedchamber to record the response offered by Streamer's audience. This omission, especially given G. B.'s initial skepticism in the argument, invites, even demands, the reader to offer his own insights. Meanwhile, G. B.'s personal exhortation to the reader brings the reader for the first time into the text. In this penultimate piece, G. B. shifts from his skeptical stance back to his role as naive narrator, whose narration the reader must measure against his own perception of Streamer's eloquence. G. B. admits that Streamer's account seems unbelievable, but the “approved authority of the ecstatical author” (54) erases all his doubts especially since he himself knows the place in which Streamer prepared his experiment and the men with whom the divine had talked the night before. These irrelevant facts are clearly inadequate evidence to “prove” Streamer's story. But the reader cannot fully dismiss G. B.'s conclusions, for the moral that G. B. draws from Streamer's account is discerning and prudent:

And ever when thou goest about anything, call to mind this proverb, Beware the Cat; not to tie up thy cat till thou have done, but to see that neither thine own nor the Devil's cat (which cannot be tied up) find anything therein whereof to accuse thee to thy shame.

(54-55)

G. B., for the wrong reasons, has come up with an ethical rule for living.

The shift from Baldwin's voice to Streamer's in the hymn creates a final blank, which the reader must fill in. If the reader is at all confused by G. B.'s apparent belief in Streamer, this last illustration of Streamer's “eloquence” should clarify what the reader's proper response should be. Streamer addresses God who has given Streamer “grace … to know / The course of things above and here below” (55). The divine asks God for “healthy wealth and rest” so that he can “unload to [the world] his learned breast” (55), earning lasting fame beyond the grave. Streamer's selfish petition is the final touch in his characterization, showing his absolute egotism even before his Maker.

III

The surface text that is the book Beware the Cat is a learned oration by a master orator, an eloquent (e.g., wise and ethical) account of a marvelous adventure. This text is supported by the explanatory notes of a loyal and believing audience, a man who once doubted the orator but who has been converted by the power of that orator's speech. The reader of this surface text, by critically perceiving the style, method, and subject matter of Streamer's oration along with the supporting materials by G. B., creates his own text: he perceives that Streamer's oration is a hybrid of dialogue and declamation, a deliberative piece by a foolish narrator who tries to prove the ridiculous notion that cats have reason. The naive G. B. offers the critical reader the example that he should not follow. But, at the same time as the notes explain, they also subtly point out the foolishness of what Streamer says, thus providing two pointers to the truth for the sensitive reader.

The concept that Baldwin is teaching is important: superstition inhibits the exercise of right critical thinking. But even more important is the recognition on the part of the reader that Baldwin teaches through a variety of stances. His rhetorical method ultimately is that of an effective lusus: it “[challenges] the reader not so much to distinguish heresy from dogma, the false from the true, as to recognize the complexity of the truth, and face the paradoxes and moral dilemmas which arise in the pursuit of truth, and to see that these cannot be simply resolved without loss of wisdom” (Duncan 40). The process by which the reader comes to understand Baldwin's controlling double mimesis and his many lesser ones in the boxes of his narrative is the significant “text” that the reader carries away, for it is this experience of reading that provides for the wary reader the method by which to read the world, by which to make the appropriate ethical choices.

This moral function of reading, along with the imitation of the dialogue/declamation, places Baldwin firmly in the context of humanist letters as modified by English Protestantism in the mid-sixteenth century. However, his use of the vernacular for his work, rather than Latin, places him outside the mainstream of the cultured elite, and it is this daring move that makes Beware the Cat both historically and aesthetically important. His choice of language demonstrates that his audience is not a coterie of scholars, the audience that Erasmus and More both addressed, but a larger public, less educated and less sophisticated. Although Beware the Cat does not have the literary or philosophical depth of Erasmus's and More's works, it is skillfully arranged and its primary theme (the mystery of human knowledge) and significance (the necessity of incorporating critical “reading” into one's life) both transcend their particular cultural ethos. In a very real sense, Baldwin was attempting to create his own audience by presenting his public with radical ideas, potentially subversive to their present moral lives, a function of any literary work called “art.” This attempted democratization of a formerly elitist literary form is peculiarly Protestant, a good example of how the English Reformation tempered its humanist legacy. In terms of literary history, Baldwin's innovation precedes by twenty years Gascoigne's Master F. J., which also uses the same rhetorical strategy.¹⁶

The double-edged quality of Beware the Cat—both elitist and popular—demonstrates the philosophical and political tensions characteristic of the age. Although Baldwin can be considered a member of the power structure because of his humanist schooling and his access to the powerful technology of the printing press (Gresham, “William Baldwin”), he nevertheless is also an agent undermining the establishment's very authority. In addition to rejecting Roman Catholic “superstition” and ritual and, by silent corollary, promoting the efficacy of English Protestantism, Beware the Cat also questions the truth of any cultural paradigm and ridicules the trappings of all power structures. It appeals to a public without a political voice to reject passivity, to think for itself, to question appearances. Finally and most important, it repudiates the concept of stasis, of immutability, in the human spirit and asserts the necessity for continual human self-examination and transformation. This ultimately means that political authority (both secular and ecclesiastical) is subordinate to the individual. Obviously this concept is antagonistic to the very foundation of the Tudor state.

However, as the 1570 ballad illustrates, Baldwin's attempt to promote a humanist program in a vernacular tongue to a popular audience had the potential for being misconstrued. Such a misreading is similar to those of declamatory works by More and Erasmus.¹⁷ Although one recent critic argues that, “during the second quarter of the [sixteenth] century … the art of teasing was discredited and left behind” (Duncan 82), the evidence of such misreading of humanist texts in both Latin and English by both learned and popular audiences seems to indicate the difficulty that literal minds have with the mode of irony. It also suggests that the intrinsic subversiveness of such texts was an “underground” phenomenon that reacted upon its culture in subtle ways over a long period of time. Finally, it indicates a critical discomfort with the concept of the reader as an important element in the transforming power of literature, an attitude that explains to a certain extent why some of these texts, Beware the Cat included, were neglected and ignored by later ages. Certainly the publishing history of Beware the Cat and the popularity of other satirical humanist texts seems to indicate a contemporary appreciation for such kinds of lusus.

In spite of such documented misreadings, the self-consciousness of audience remains an overt aspect in the composition of English Renaissance literature and in its critical appreciation during its own age. Not only were translations being made of similar Latin humanist texts, but contemporary works written in English also depended on this construct. For example, Baldwin's own Mirror for Magistrates (comp. 1555, pub. 1559) is a series of verse narratives apparently spoken by ghosts to a group of men who then write down what they hear. Also Gascoigne's Master F. J., like Beware the Cat, presents a series of mimeses of reading and listening as does the sonnet sequence first given expression in the late 1570s by Sir Philip Sidney. The vitality and immediacy in these nondramatic works gloss the next generation's recognized excellence in the drama (Altman 64-106). Thus, the starting point for so much of the generic experimentation in the English Renaissance—of which Beware the Cat is a significant part—seems to be this pervasive concern with right reading, with providing lessons for understanding the world.

Notes

1. This marginal status is challenged most dramatically by the recent publication of William A. Ringler, Jr. and Michael Flachmann's edition of Beware the Cat. This volume not only contains a masterfully edited version of Baldwin's novel based on the most authoritative early text, but also includes an updated version of Ringler's 1978 essay in Novel, which places Baldwin's work in the context of the history of English prose fiction, as well as two appendices jointly entitled “The Beginnings of the English Novel”: first, “A History of Longer Fictional Prose Narratives in English to 1558,” and second, “Plot Summaries of Longer Fictional Prose Narratives in English to 1558.” This small volume is a major corrective to the critical silence about Baldwin in recent scholarship on Renaissance prose fiction: two books by David Margolies and Paul Salzman, both published in 1985, virtually ignore Beware the Cat (Salzman includes only a bibliographical reference); Arthur Kinney in his Humanist Poetics (1986) devotes only two pages to Baldwin's work at the end of a chapter on Gascoigne's The Adventures of Master F. J. (115-16). See note 4 below, however, for several recent extended discussions of Beware the Cat.

2. For example, the study of rhetoric, the heart of the new learning introduced into England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, was defined in practice as the study of oratory, the art of speaking well; consequently, the sense of audience was incorporated into the very composition of a text. Also, the Horatian maxim, which the Renaissance adopted for its own use, describes the purpose of literature as both didactic and entertaining, thus presuming the audience as intrinsic to literature's meaning. See Stanley Fish for an overview of one dominant tradition of reading theory from Plato to Donne (1-77) and for Fish's own description of his method (383-427).

3. Reader-response criticism seems to be demanded by fictional texts. Kinney argues that “the art of methaxis—the complicit participation by an audience in actively judging a fiction—became the common means not only of ambassadors, orators, and actors, but of fiction writers too at the dawn of the English novel” (“Rhetoric and Fiction” 388). In an earlier article, Kinney examines The Praise of Folly, Utopia, and The Adventures of Master F. J., noting that the reader is forced into the fiction in order to learn, that he is confronted with the ambiguity of language (and of the world) in order to judge the true from the false, the works of God from the works of Satan (“Rhetoric as Poetic”). See also his extended discussion of the Utopia in Rhetoric and Poetic. In discussing Elizabethan romances, A. C. Hamilton notes that the methodology of reader response is one useful tool since in romance “there is nothing apart from the reader's experience” (“Elizabethan Romance” 299). See also his later article, “Elizabethan Prose Fiction,” which addresses other modes of fiction.

4. William A. Ringler, Jr., points out that the work functions as a novel of ideas, incorporating such sophisticated narrative strategies as shifts in point of view, first-person narrative with authorial comment, an internesting of actions within an enveloping action, and characterization by speech style (123). Stephen Gresham adds to this list of innovative narrative devices “realistic dialogue, unity of point of view, effective transition to direct speech, … verbal inventiveness[,] … the creation of a diversity of scenes and incidents, the handling of satire, and the handling of the functional grotesque (“William Baldwin's Beware the Cat” 7-8). John N. King places the work in a strong tradition of English Reformation literature, noting that “under the guise of parody, [Beware the Cat] combines the conventional devices and forms of proverb, history, tale, oration, dream vision, beast fable, skeltonics, medical exposition, and hymn” (387). In Humanist Poetics, Kinney labels Cat as Reformist Tudor fiction, which, through the strategies of wordplay and wit, discredits “the legendary traditions claimed by the Roman Church” (115). See also Ringler and Flachmann's introduction and appendices to their edition of Beware the Cat, which place Baldwin's work in the larger context of the history of English prose fiction through 1558.

5. Although I have consulted the works of several reader-response theorists (particularly Fish and Iser), I have ultimately relied on no one system. Concentration on the text of Beware the Cat, together with its historical context, seemed to provide the best way to proceed. However, this article rests on the work previously done by earlier practical and theoretical critics as my bibliography attests.

6. The experience of reading is widely agreed to have changed in the Renaissance, but the timing of this change is in debate. Terence Cave argues that, in the sixteenth century, “imitation as a theory of writing contributes to a change in the habits of reading” (155): texts are no longer perceived in this century as closed and authoritative wholes, but as objects which are, of necessity, transformed by readers. Victoria Kahn argues that this attitude toward the nature of reading is evident much earlier than the sixteenth century, that “early quattrocento humanists … were concerned about defining reading not simply as an act of allegorical or Ciceronian appropriation but as the productive, practical exercise of the reader's judgment” (“Figure” 154). See John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., for a selection of essays addressing this theme.

7. I am grateful to John M. Wallace for calling this work to my attention. For discussion relating Plutarch's work to seventeenth-century conceptions of reading and interpretation, see his essay in the first volume of Critical Inquiry.

8. This involvement of the reader as part of the meaning of the text suggests why satire was such a popular mode for the Protestant humanists in the middle of the sixteenth century (King 18). The basis of satire is that it is “an attack by means of a manifest fiction upon discernible historic particulars” (Rosenheim 31). Normally, satire's purpose is not simply aesthetic but didactic as well. The author expects the reader to understand the nature of the attack and to learn about the particular social abuse or corrupt politician. The author may even expect his work to spark the reader to action. Thus the inherent meaning of the satiric mode rests on the interaction of author, text, and reader. See A. R Heiserman, King 285-86, and Gresham “Tudor Prose Satire.”

9. For general discussion on the nature and importance of the dialogue in the early Tudor period, see Roger Deakins; King 258-62, 284-92; and Joel B. Altman 68-70. See also the discussion of dialogue in relationship to More's Utopia in David Bevington, Robert C. Elliot, and Richard J. Schoeck.

10. Henry K. Miller's article still is a useful overview of the declamation in the later Renaissance period. The influence of this classical form on earlier humanist literature has been the subject of several recent articles. See Andrew D. Weiner for a discussion of the declamation and Utopia. Elizabeth Story Donno argues that More's History of Richard III is most properly read as a vituperatio, a kind of declamation, rather than as a kind of history. See also Kinney's work on the alliance of rhetoric and poetic in Renaissance fiction. For the classical background of the paradoxical encomium, see Theodore Burgess and Arthur Stanley Pease.

11. Both the declamation and the dialogue are further related to paradox, a rhetorical device that is inherently dramatic, offering one side of a dialectic, the other side of which is completed by the reader. As A. E. Malloch notes, the rhetorical situation of dialogue is identical to that of the Renaissance paradox: “Like the paradox [dialogue] perfects the deliberately fallacious argument for the purpose of revealing truth, though it differs from the paradox in containing a written refutation: the reader of the disputed question participates as audience, the reader of the paradox as actor” (106). See also Rosalie Colie 3-40.

12. All quotations are taken from Ringler and Flachmann's edition, which is based on British Library MS Additional 24, 628, “a careful transcript, made in 1847, from a printed copy of” the first edition of 1570, printed by John Allde, which is no longer extant (Ringler and Flachmann xxix). I have also consulted Holden's 1963 edition, which is based on the inferior 1584 text.

13. In the 1584 edition, the letter to Young is preceded by a poem entitled “T. K. to the Reader,” a poem of eleven stanzas in rhyming fourteeners (Ringler and Flachmann 1-2). The poem straightforwardly mirrors the combination of jest and earnest in the body of the work by enclosing the serious subject of the work—the superstitious practices of the Roman Catholic Church—in a “playful” external form. The tone of this poem is light, partially because of the sing-song meter and partially because of the linking effect of stanza to stanza by a kind of anadiplosis, the repetition in a question of the last word or words of one stanza in the first line of the next. T. K. makes the delightful nature of the text explicit in stanza five when he calls the book a “fiction,” a term opposite in meaning from the serious narrative of history.

    The actual subject of Beware the Cat is revealed gradually in the poem. The first two stanzas assert that the book was compiled in a past time and was “exiled” (censored) because it burlesqued Roman Catholic practices. The following seven stanzas state that, although these practices are ridiculous, it is more accurate to see them as dangerous, since they prevent simple people from being truly virtuous. The last three stanzas reiterate the cautionary statement to beware the cat, since the cat will uncover those practices and those people who are still true to them.

14. Hannah H. Gray (206) offers a useful summary of the humanist's picture of the ideal orator.

15. This is essentially the difference between oral and literary texts that Lord has charted. Walter J. Ong's summary is useful:

    [Lord] notes that in the oral “text” expression is chiefly by means of formulas, with the bulk of the remainder formula-like or “formulaic” and very little nonformulaic expression. In a literary text, on the contrary, we find few formulas and only a bit of the formulaic, leaving us with nonformulaic composition. Oral composition or grammatical structure is typically nonperiodic, proceeding in the “adding” style; literary composition tends more to the periodic. Oral composition uses ideas and themes which are well established and can be rapidly maneuvered in standard patterns by the bard; literary composition uses typically newer themes or combines older themes in ways more novel than are usually found in oral composition.”

    (33)

16. Kinney anticipates me in this observation (Humanist Poetics 115-16).

17. This kind of literary challenge had always been difficult, however, even for those who supposedly knew the rules of the game. For example, Erasmus found himself defending his use of the declamation in his Moriae Encomium almost immediately, and his critics were not the uneducated, but some of his own fellow humanists. In a famous defense of his work to Martin Dorp, Erasmus emphasizes the serious purpose of that mock encomium:

    Nor was the end I had in view in my Folly different in any way from the purpose of my other works, though the means differed. In the Enchiridion I laid down quite simply the pattern of a Christian life. … And the Folly is concerned in a playful spirit with the same subject as the Enchiridion. My purpose was guidance and not satire; to help, not to hurt; to show men how to become better and not to stand in their way.

    (114-15)

    This “via diversa,” says Erasmus, is a way of insinuating himself into “minds which are hard to please, and not only cure them but amuse them too” (115). The cure, however, is dependent on the ability of the reader to read properly, to see what is in the text, to understand its context, and not to infer what is not there (125-26). This “process” of coming to an understanding is a primary ingredient to the gaining of moral and intellectual wisdom.

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