SOURCE: Maslen, Robert. “‘The Cat Got Your Tongue’: Pseudo-Translation, Conversion, and Control in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat.” Translation and Literature 8, no. 1 (1999): 3-27.

[In the following essay, Maslen claims that Beware the Cat comments on the state of printing and translation during Edwardian rule just before the accession of Mary I and is a sophisticated celebration of the powers of the new information technology.]

William Baldwin's clever little fable Beware the Cat—a piece of prose fiction written in 1553, published in 1570, and christened by its recent editors ‘The First English Novel’—records what is undoubtedly the most astonishing feat of translation of the sixteenth century.¹ In it a priest called Gregory Streamer reveals to a select group of admirers the results of his experiments in translating the languages of the animals, a feat which he claims to have accomplished with the aid of mind-altering drugs and a fortunate conjunction of planetary influences. The original aim of his researches, he explains, was to shed new light on the sophisticated culture of the common household cat, a topic to which his attention was first drawn through the unreliable but perennially attractive agencies of unsubstantiated rumour and second-hand gossip. Like many better-documented research projects, his investigation was cut short by lack of funds. But before its abrupt termination, Streamer's exercise in bestial eavesdropping succeeds in unveiling the bewildering diversity of little-known languages which divide one community from another in mid-Tudor England. Within these cohabiting linguistic communities, we learn, a number of secret and illegal acts of translation are going on under the noses of the Protestant authorities. And the existence of these illegal acts of translation poses a serious threat to the good work of Protestant translators like Baldwin himself, who are labouring to convert the English to the true religion by converting biblical, classical, and humanist texts into their native tongue.

For all its formal and stylistic playfulness, then, Beware the Cat marks itself out as the product of a period of high anxiety among Protestants and Catholics alike: a period when the English nation was about to be translated from male to female rule, from one religion to another, perhaps even from independent nationhood to political and economic subservience beneath the yoke of a foreign power. The witty games Baldwin plays with early modern concepts of translation enact the radical instability of the Edwardian state under the administration of Northumberland: its eminent ideological translatability, its schizophrenic confusion over its own identity, its infection by the outmoded Catholic values it has tried vainly to expel from the English body politic. In fact, Beware the Cat and its fictional translations provide the twentieth-century reader with a unique glimpse into the melancholy state of mind of English reformers in the crucial six months before the accession of Mary I.

The book is divided into three main parts. In the first, Gregory Streamer describes how he became convinced that cats are capable of reason and speech after hearing a number of stories about encounters between men and talking beasts, especially cats. The second part records in detail his preparation of the magic potion which gave him access to the feline tongue; and in the third he tells us what he heard when he used his newly acquired understanding to listen in on stories told at the trial of a cat called Mouse-slayer. The movement of the book from unconfirmed rumours about feline culture in the first part to an eye-witness account of the linguistic, social, and legal practices of cats in the third looks like a straightforward progression from ignorance to enlightenment, from blind superstition to clear-eyed rationalism: a comic celebration of the success of the reformers' programme to translate the kingdom of England from the linguistic and intellectual obscurantism of the Papists to the God-given linguistic transparency of Protestantism, whose open access to the scriptural Word gives them equally open access—through the gift of tongues—to the domestic machinations of their Catholic enemies. The trial of Mouse-slayer in the third part of the book is entirely taken up with ribald accounts of her unwelcome intrusions on the clandestine activities of Edwardian Catholics. These intrusions are invariably as painful as they are embarrassing. In one story, for instance, Mouse-slayer bites the secret lover of a Catholic wife by the balls as he crouches behind a wall-hanging (p. 50); in another she terrifies a lascivious priest into setting fire to his own breeches (p. 49); in a third she ‘all to-bescrat’ the thighs and belly of a Catholic brothel-keeper, ‘so that I dare say she was not whole again in two months after’ (p. 43). The Protestant reader cheerfully participates in these exposures by means of Streamer's translation of the feline tongue, and looks forward (presumably) to the eventual erasure of the degenerate remains of Catholic culture in England through the combined operations of divine Providence—as manifested in the pleasingly appropriate punishments inflicted by cats on secret Catholic vices—and Protestant informers like Streamer, who are capable of unveiling Papist plots no matter what language they are couched in.

But of course the progress of the Edwardian reformation is not as simple as that. For one thing, Streamer's investigation into the lives of cats demonstrates at every stage the dogged resilience of Catholic superstition in Edwardian England. The Protestant project of translating God's word has its counterpart in the forms of corporal translation countenanced by the Church of Rome: the translation of bread into the body of Christ at the Mass, against which Protestant polemicists had written so many tracts; and the demonic shape-shifting simulated by magical illusion—‘translation’ in the sense that Shakespeare's Bottom is ‘translated’—which is discussed at length in the first part of the book, and which is always associated with the doctrinal slipperiness of the old faith.² The conviction of the authenticity of these Catholic forms of translation seems, on the evidence of Beware the Cat, to be ubiquitous in the Tudor demesnes, from rural Staffordshire (where the rumours about feline culture began) to the heart of the metropolis (where Streamer learns to decipher the feline language). In all three parts of the book Streamer encounters or hears of English men and women who are more susceptible to persuasion through the illusory transformations worked by Catholic ‘conjurers’ than they are to the sight-clearing operation of the translated Word of God.

Two stories told by Mouse-slayer in the third part testify to the efficacy of these false acts of translation in converting both the old and the young generations to Catholicism. In the first, the cat witnesses a priest healing an old woman of blindness at the moment of transubstantiation. This miraculous event is placed in direct competition with attempts by the woman's sons to convert her to Protestantism, a task rendered unusually difficult, we learn, by the proverbial stubbornness of old age (‘my dame … and her husband were both old, and therefore hard to be turned from their rooted belief which they had in the Mass’, p. 37).³ The old woman's sons enlist the help of a ‘learned kinsman of theirs’ in their efforts to ‘turn’ her, and together these Protestants so baffle her priestly confessor in religious disputes (as the woman herself points out) ‘with Holy Writ and saints' writings’ that he ‘could say nothing but call them “heretics”, and that they had made the New Testament themselves’ (p. 38). It would seem, then, the younger generation uses verbal translations as the chief instruments of its evangelism. Among the ‘saints' writings’ likely to be invoked by Protestant missionaries were the writings of Jerome and Augustine on the problems of translating the Scriptures. More importantly, the accusation of having ‘made the New Testament themselves’—of rewriting the New Testament for their own ends—was regularly levelled against translators of the Bible, both Protestant and Catholic, by their ideological antagonists.⁴ The priest's successful conversion of the old woman, on the other hand, depends on a quite different kind of translation. He evidently has little or no direct knowledge of the Bible, but uses verbal abuse as a substitute for theological disputation: when he denounces the old woman's relatives as ‘heretics’, a marginal note informs us that ‘Railing and slandering are the Papists' scriptures’ (p. 38). Instead, for scriptural translation he substitutes the corporal translation of bread into ‘Christ's flesh, body, soul, and bone … as it was born of our Blessed Lady’. Magic, in fact, is the preferred method of the Catholic Church for retaining the loyalty of its wavering followers. The old woman is healed of her blindness at the precise point of the Mass which had stimulated the fiercest controversy between traditionalists and reformers, the moment when (according to Catholics) bread became flesh, or when (according to Protestants) the doctrinal wool was pulled over the eyes of credulous believers in an act of psychological legerdemain. One of the cats who hears about the wonderful cure advances two possible theories to explain it: this was either ‘a mighty miracle’ or else ‘a mischievous subtlety of a magistical minister’, whereby the priest ‘by magical art blinded her … afore, and so by like magical sorcery cured her again’ (p. 39). The second explanation is reinforced by another marginal gloss, which asserts that ‘Sorcerers may make folk blind’, as well as by the testimony of Mouse-slayer the cat, who witnessed the old woman's cure and was much impressed by it. Since then, however, Mouse-slayer has kittened many times in a room ‘where a priest every day said Mass’, but found to her disappointment that her kittens remained as blind after birth as if they had never heard Mass in their lives: ‘my kitlings saw naught the better, but rather the worse’. The final phrase neatly confirms the Protestant conviction that Catholic translations and ‘miracles’ condemn those who believe in them to a condition of spiritual blindness which is worse than the merely physical disabilities they are supposed to heal.

This spiritual blindness is figuratively alluded to in the darkness under cover of which Catholics perform their devotions in the third part of Beware the Cat. The Latin Mass, which was abolished in 1549 under the First Edwardian Act of Uniformity, is said ‘privily and nightly’ in the bedrooms of the old (p. 39); a Catholic brothel-keeper prays to a forbidden image of our Lady ‘every night, when everybody were gone to bed’ (p. 40); and it is by night that the most humiliating incident in the book takes place, when a mischievous servant in a Catholic household fixes walnut shells to Mouse-slayer's feet as an ill-considered practical joke. This leads to a chaotic midnight scene where priests, servants, and householders mill about in confusion, convinced by the noise of the walnut shells and by a ‘glimpsing’ of the terrified Mouse-slayer that they are under assault from the Devil himself (p. 49). Naturally enough, when the victims of the hoax learn the truth—that the Devil was nothing but a puss in wooden boots—their first concern is to cover up the incident: ‘Silence’, as the marginal gloss observes, ‘is the best friend that shame hath’. But naturally, too, the tale got out through the offices of Streamer's translation. Where conventional Protestant translations aimed to replace the darkness of infidelity with the light of divine knowledge, Streamer's Englishing of feline gossip sheds an unsettling light on the darkness which envelops a substantial section of the English population.

The other narrative about Catholic translation and conversion told by Mouse-slayer in the third part of the book is rather more elaborate than the tale of the curing of the widow's blindness. This is only fitting since it describes the conversion of a younger woman: as another marginal note points out, ‘Old folk are lighter of credit than young’ (p. 39). The story concerns a faithful young wife who is persuaded to commit adultery by an elderly Catholic widow, the brothel-keeper who has a special devotion to the Virgin Mary. The old woman effects the young woman's conversion through an emotive appeal to her sense of romance, which she invokes by telling her the story of a latter-day metamorphosis, a corporal translation every bit as extraordinary as the eucharistic moment of transubstantiation. The widow explains that the widow's cat (Mouse-slayer again) is in fact her married daughter, translated from human form by the gods after cruelly refusing to surrender her wifely chastity to a lovesick young man. The young man died as a result of her daughter's rejection, and the transformation from human to cat was inflicted on her daughter as just punishment for her heartlessness. Finally the widow shows the young wife a letter, supposedly written by the dying lover, as proof of the story's veracity. The faithful young wife is so horrified by the fate of the widow's daughter and so touched by the young man's epistolary eloquence that she assents at once to adultery. In doing so she gives the Protestant reader a striking example of the power of certain kinds of translation to convert faithfulness to infidelity, honest wifehood to the whorishness of the Church of Rome. The fake translation of the widow's daughter into a cat begins to melt the young wife's heart; and the fake letter, full of the elaborate metaphors which contemporary rhetorical handbooks call translatio, completes the process. It would have seemed fitting to a radical reformer that translation to a false religion should have been achieved through false translations.

One metaphor in particular might have summoned up the idea of scriptural translation for a well-read Protestant. The phrase ‘stony heart’, which occurs towards the end of the young man's letter—‘I beseech … the just gods that either they change that honest stony heart, or else disfigure that fair merciless favor’ (p. 44)—was a favourite with Protestant writers such as Katherine Parr, Tyndale, Latimer, and Thomas Becon. As Janel Mueller has pointed out, stonyheartedness was identified by Parr in her Lamentation of a sinner (1547) ‘as the source of the world's disregard for Christ’, and was used in that text as the ‘focus of a prayer for the efficacy of true ministers of the Word’.⁵ The appearance of the phrase in a fake love letter stuffed with the vocabulary of courtly love, and exploited by a Catholic pimp as a tool of her trade, substantiates a point made repeatedly by Tudor Protestants about the bad habits of contemporary readers: that erotic literature from medieval romance to the continental fabliau serves as a substitute for the scriptural Word among courtiers corrupted by Catholic tastes. In his Report and Discourse … of the affaires and state of Germany, written (like Beware the Cat) in 1553, the Protestant scholar Roger Ascham complains of the dangerous amateur politicians—‘common discoursers of all Princes affaires’—who derive their contempt for professional ‘good counsellors’ from their vitiated literary preferences:

one common note, the most part of this brotherhode of discoursers commonly cary with them where they be bold to speake: to like better Tullies offices, then S. Paules Epistles: and a tale in Bocace, then a story of the Bible.⁶

Ascham repeated the last two phrases in his famous attack on Italianate Englishmen in The Scholemaster (1570), immediately after condemning the Elizabethan fashion for translating into English Italian romances, which he saw as posing a major threat to the work of Protestant pedagogues in England.⁷ Baldwin evidently shared Ascham's anxiety about the contemporary substitution of erotic literature for the translated Bible. In his metrical paraphrase of the Canticles or Balades of Salomon (1549), he expresses the wish ‘that suche songes myght once drive out of office the baudy balades of lecherous love that commonly are indited and song of idle courtyers in princes and noble mens houses’ (sig. A3^r). Mouse-slayer's tale of a woman who is converted to adultery by one such erotic text—which operates on the stony ground of her heart as effectively as the seed of God's Word is supposed to act on the stony ground of infidelity—offers an alarming illustration of the difficulties encountered by distributors of the Scriptures in the face of such seductive literary competition.

From its opening pages, Beware the Cat associates itself closely with these Protestant distributors of the Word of God: the printers, translators, and editors who labour to convey the Scriptures and the Christianized texts of ancient philosophers to the reading public. Anyone who knew the identity of its ‘editor’ William Baldwin (and they could have guessed it from his initials and from his motto, ‘Love and Live’, at the head of the Epistle Dedicatory) might have thought of him first and foremost as an accomplished translator.⁸ Baldwin had published three translations in the six years before he wrote Beware the Cat. The first and most famous was his hugely popular Treatise of Morall Philosophie (1547), a collection of proverbs, epigrams, and philosophers' lives which he describes as having been ‘stollen from among the Latined Grecians’ for the use of Christians, and which went through more editions in Tudor England than any other text except the Bible.⁹ The second was his metrical paraphrase of The Canticles or Balades of Salomon (1549), which included a glossary of Hebrew terms as a testament to Baldwin's credentials as a commentator; and the third was a scurrilous anti-Catholic satire, Wonderfull Newes of the Death of Paule the III (c. 1552), originally written in Latin by a Continental reformer three years before Baldwin published his English version.

Baldwin was also known as the scholarly assistant of one of the most active Protestant printers of Edward's reign, Edward Whitchurch, whose output included the first and second Edwardian prayer-books as well as many editions of the English Bible. The Dedicatory Epistle of Beware the Cat positively bustles with the hectic business of translating, editing, and printing with which Baldwin had made himself familiar through his association with Whitchurch. In it he explains that he has transcribed ‘one of the stories which Master Streamer told the last Christmas’ as accurately as he could, that he has divided it into three parts and added a commentary and an epilogue ‘so making it book-like’, that he would like Streamer to correct it before it gets printed, and that he has another of Streamer's translations ‘out of the Arabic’ ready for printing as soon as the opportunity presents itself (p. 3). One is reminded of the constant allusions to additional printing projects in Baldwin's other work: his promise to set forth ‘a boke of notes, and such an exposicion of the Metaphorical wurdes, as shal serve the for a commentary’ on his Balades of Salomon (sig. A1^v); his urging of other authors to add further translations from the classics to his Treatise of Morall Philosophie; and his praise of translations by Sir Thomas Elyot (attributed to ‘good affeccion [for] the common wele’, sig. F2^r) and others later in the same book.¹⁰ All these allusions contribute to the impression that Baldwin's own translating and editing activities form only a tiny part of an immense ongoing campaign to deliver religion and learning out of the hands of the ecclesiastical elite and into the ownership of the English people.

The sense of frantic intellectual and commercial activity generated by the Dedicatory Epistle is carried over into the body of Beware the Cat. The conversation which first excites Streamer's interest in cats takes place in the printing-house of the radical Protestant printer John Day, where Streamer is staying in order to supervise the correction of his ‘Greek alphabets’ as they come off the press (p. 9). As Baldwin's modern editors point out, Streamer's lodgings in the printing-house are ‘more specifically located than any place in earlier English literature’ (p. xxii). Later Streamer refers to another forthcoming work of his, a non-existent astronomical tract called the Book of Heaven and Hell or Of the Great Egg (p. 36). And the conceited little ‘Hymn’ that closes Beware the Cat, composed (we are told) by Streamer himself, asks God to grant him ‘Long life to unload to us his learned breast’ (p. 55), presumably in a plethora of additional volumes. Baldwin's narrative, then, locates itself at the white-hot centre of the Protestant printing industry of the mid-Tudor period. It stresses the instrumentality of print in breaking down the barriers between tongues: both Beware the Cat and its projected successor, the Arabic treatise on the Cure of the Great Plague, depend on Streamer's translations from esoteric languages, and Streamer's alphabets will allow Protestant readers direct access to the Greek New Testament as well as to ancient pagan learning. And Baldwin's book also stresses the extraordinary fecundity of the press, with one text generating another in a seemingly endless sequence. At the end of Edward's reign, the Protestant project of re-educating the English people would seem, on the evidence presented by Streamer and his environment, to be in a very healthy state.

But things are not going as well as we might think. Although Streamer is an extraordinarily versatile translator—his linguistic acquisitions include Greek, Chaldean, Arabic, and Egyptian (p. 17)—his enthusiasm for languages does not seem to be shared by his youthful contemporaries. He complains about their indifference in the first part of his narrative: ‘And sure it is a shame for all young men that they be no more studious in the tongues; but the world is now come to that pass, that if he can prate a little Latin and handle a racquet and a pair of six-square bowls, he shall sooner obtain any living than the best learned in a whole city’ (pp. 9-10). The lament is commonplace among contemporary Protestant humanists such as Ascham, and seems to place Streamer squarely in their ideological camp: after all, a lack of translators among the younger generation must pose a serious threat to the Protestant pedagogic project. But Streamer is clearly less concerned about threats to religious enlightenment than about damage to his own career. We soon learn that he thinks of himself as among the ‘best learned in a whole city’, since he congratulates one of his interlocutors in the first part for delivering ‘such proof of natural knowledge in this your brief talk, as I think (except myself and few more the best-learned alive) none could have done the like’ (p. 20). The ‘hymn of [Streamer's] making’ at the end of the book gives thanks to God for endowing him ‘With skill so great in languages and tongues / As never breathed from Mithridates' lungs’, and asks in addition that he be granted ‘fame so great to overlive his grave / As none had erst, nor any after have’ (p. 55). Streamer's anxiety about the lack of interest in tongues would appear to spring from the fear that his own linguistic talents will not receive the recognition and remuneration they deserve. A very reasonable fear when one considers the uncertainties of the Tudor job market; but for a ‘divine’ like Streamer to invest his highest hopes of everlasting life in his reputation as a writer would have looked most unchristian to Baldwin's Protestant colleagues.

Streamer also seems anxious to maintain authorial control over the texts he considers his private property. In the Epistle Dedicatory Baldwin confesses that he has written down Streamer's narrative without his permission, and expresses some misgivings about Streamer's reaction to the discovery that someone else has edited his text, ‘which perhaps he would rather do himself to have, as he deserveth, the glory’ due to his authorship (p. 3). Baldwin's misgivings are well founded, since Streamer had only agreed to narrate the story of his experiment with cats on condition that his audience—a group of gentlemen gathered at the house of Edward Ferrers to rehearse a play for performance at court—remain totally silent throughout: ‘But this I promise you afore, if I do tell it, that as soon as any man curiously interrupteth me, I will leave off and not speak one word more’ (p. 6). Streamer would seem to be something of a control freak as well as an assiduous self-promoter. His desire to exert control over his own narrative might have reminded his Protestant readers of the efforts of the Catholic Church to maintain ecclesiastical control over the Scriptures, since in both cases unsanctioned editorial interference could be taken as one of the chief threats to the authority of the printed text. More's objection to the Wycliffite translation of the Bible, for instance, was partly based on the editorial machinery with which it was accompanied (‘certain prologues and glosses which he made thereupon’),¹¹ while Streamer's narrative is constantly ‘interrupted’ by the marginal glosses inserted by its ‘editor’ Baldwin. At the same time, Streamer's wish for control over his text is a little ironic in view of his marked lack of control over his own scholarly researches. His preparation of his magic potion in the second book is repeatedly disrupted—by barbarous hunters who beat him while he is out searching for ingredients (p. 26), by the curiosity of a saucy servant (p. 30), by the thunderous ringing of a nearby bell which reduces him to a condition of abject terror after he has taken the potion (p. 32), and by an angry crow landing on his head as he hides from the noise of the bell in a chimney-corner (p. 33). His scientific ‘experiment’, then, is decidedly not a controlled one. And this lack of control, we quickly learn, extends to all sections of Edwardian society, from the ordinary countrymen and citizens who cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood, accurate report and mischievous gossip, reality and magical illusion, to the Edwardian administration, which seems to be quite incapable of extirpating the clandestine Catholic practices it has banned.

As the modern editors of Beware the Cat point out (see note 2, below), Streamer, for all his high opinion of his own learning, is clearly as credulous and as vulnerable to superstition as the most unlettered of his English contemporaries. In the first part of the book he quickly becomes convinced of the rationality of cats on hearing a series of tall tales, all of them at second or third hand, about encounters with cats and werewolves in Ireland and rural Staffordshire. The imprecision of these rumours links them to the ancient traditions and customs on which the hegemony of the Catholic Church depends, which exist independently of any textual authority.¹² Streamer has, in fact, an unscholarly fondness for what the marginal gloss calls ‘unwritten verities’ (p. 19); he is inclined to give disproportionate weight to the ‘natural knowledge’ of a man called Thomas (p. 20), who sets himself up as something of an expert on cat culture. Streamer swallows Thomas's stories about cats, werewolves, and witches as if they were gospel truth. Baldwin's readers, on the other hand, might be inclined to be more sceptical about Streamer's informant. Although Thomas claims to have said nothing about the conduct of cats and witches ‘but that I have seen, and whereof any man might conjecture as I do’ (p. 20), the most perfunctory glance at his stories shows that they are drawn entirely from second-hand sources of the most unreliable kind: a dinner conversation with an Irish churl, the unsupported testimony of a man who claims to have been a werewolf, the childhood reminiscences of a ‘credible clerk of Oxford’ (p. 20). And Thomas's own testimony is called into question when we learn, while he is still telling his stories, that he later died in prison under suspicion of practising black magic (p. 19). When Streamer finally turns to a written text to confirm Thomas's conjectures—he finds the recipe for his potion in a treatise attributed to Albertus Magnus, the Liber Secretorum—he fails altogether to follow its instructions, and stumbles across the formula he needs largely, it seems, by accident. Or else, some readers might argue, through the agency of the Devil. Streamer appeals to the Devil twice in his nocturnal conjurings, and by the time his experiment is under way his conscience has been inflamed to such a pitch that at one point he thinks he has been assaulted by devils, and at another that he is under attack by the Prince of Darkness himself. He gives vent to his fear in the same cry—‘The Devil, the Devil, the Devil’ (p. 33)—which he later transfers to the Catholic householders who are terrorized by the cat wearing walnut-shell shoes in the third part of his narrative (p. 48). The Protestant divine for whom Baldwin professes such unbounded admiration in his Epistle Dedicatory would seem, in fact, to have a good deal in common with the Catholic magicians he affects to despise.¹³

Once one is alerted to them, indications of Streamer's Catholic leanings abound throughout Baldwin's text. On one occasion he is accused by one of his friends at John Day's printing house of playing ‘Nichodem or the stubborn Popish conjurer’ (p. 17) for entertaining implausible scientific theories reminiscent of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. In John 3.3, Nicodemus was a pharisee who visited Jesus by night in order to question him on religious matters; and for radical reformers like John Bale, a Nicodemite was the worst kind of temporizing hypocrite: ‘And therefore these Nicodemites that will visit Christ only in the dark and by night and not so openly before men’, Bale wrote in 1558, ‘the Lord will not acknowledge before his Heavenly father’.¹⁴ Streamer's hypocrisy manifests itself openly in the second part of his narrative, where he attacks the superstitions of hunters, whose refusal to name certain animals for fear of getting ‘ill luck in the game’ he likens to the beliefs of ‘Papists’ and other ‘unlucky, idolatrical, miscreant infidels’ (p. 26). But his attack on superstitious hunters occurs while he is himself engaged in the most superstitious form of hunting—the collection of animal carcasses for his magic potion; and he tries to be as rigorous about observing ‘times, days, or words’ in preparing his potion as any of his fellow hunters—something which, as a marginal note warns his readers, ‘argueth infidelity’ in those who follow such magical prescriptions (p. 26). The chief narrator of Beware the Cat, then, has secret affinities with Papist idolaters which he will not acknowledge but cannot shake off. The likely consequences of these affinities are implicit in the narrative's largely nocturnal setting. Christ's conversation with Nicodemus closes with an allusion to the dominant topic of St John's Gospel, the struggle between darkness and light: ‘He that believeth … is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil’ (John 3.18-19). The gloom that enshrouds the comic stories of the third part of Beware the Cat indicates the not-so-comic fate of the stories' protagonists: they are to be condemned to the darkness they have embraced, and so, if he is not careful, will their fictional narrator be.

Gregory Streamer's name gives another clue to his mingled religious identity; a clue which, in a text as preoccupied with deciphering the hidden meanings of words as this is, would hardly have escaped the alert Tudor reader. The text ends, as we have seen, with a short ‘hymn’ of praise written by Streamer to himself, and in it he insists that his name should not be taken as a sign of his religious affiliations. He gives thanks to God

Which hast given grace to Gregory, no Pope,
No King, no Lord; whose treasures are their hope;
But silly priest, which like a streamer waves
In ghostly good, despised of foolish knaves.

(p. 55)

Of course, Streamer's insistence that he is not a Pope has the effect of drawing his readers' attention to his papal namesakes, among them Gregory the Great, the man who punningly compared Angles to angels and set in motion the conversion of England to the faith of Rome. Streamer's surname, on the other hand, links him with the sign of the cross, the ‘banner’ of God's love which Baldwin had associated with the conversion of the Church to Protestantism in his Canticles or Balades of Salomon of 1549. Here Baldwin allegorizes the Song of Songs phrase by phrase in a series of poems which interpret the biblical text as a prophetic three-part history of the Church, its apostolic origins, its decline into decadence, and its sixteenth-century reformation. Towards the end of the series occurs the following stanza:

The streamer have I seen
Of love, whiche Krist my Kyng
Hath reard for those that been
The flocke whome he would bryng
                                                            To love.

(sig. C3^r)

In this poem as in Streamer's ‘Hymn’, the streamer is the cross of Christ, an omnipresent emblem of hope which displays the ‘ghostly good’ intended by God to his erring followers—its significance is explained in the prose argument which precedes the poem.¹⁵ Two rival processes of conversion, then, are signalled by Streamer's Christian name and surname: England's conversion to Catholicism by Gregory the Great and his papal successors, and its sixteenth-century restoration by purveyors of ‘Goddes hollye wurde’ to the primitive simplicity of the early Church. Streamer would have it that the second element in his name is the dominant one; but radical Protestants would have deduced from his actions that his connection with Papistry had by no means been successfully severed.¹⁶

At the centre of the Protestant printing and translating industries, then, lurks the duplicitous figure of the multilingual priest, who is equally capable of applying his linguistic talents to the glory of God or to his own glory, in the service of Christ or in the service of the Devil. Baldwin referred to his versified commentary on the Song of Songs as an unlocking of scriptural secrets, made possible only by the action of God's grace. In the last poem of the volume he asks God to send him

                              thy sprite that may constrayne
All folke through fayth, to gather to thy folde:
That hypocrites theyr folly may refrayne,
And be in dede, the same that seme they wolde.

And he goes on to request

                    that I suche secretes shall unfolde
As darkly hid, the scriptures do contayne,
That in the hartes of all they maye take holde,
And to thy truth all unbelevers gayne.

(sigs. N2^r-v)

The hypocritical Streamer, by contrast, employs his linguistic gifts to unlock the secrets of the cats for the sake of personal fame; in other words, his translations cater to the worldly rather than to the spiritual aspect of his being. As a result, the secrets he gleans from the beasts (with the aid of Albertus Magnus' Book of Secrets) are not the profound philosophical truths ascribed by medieval and humanist scholars to the beast fables of Aesop—Baldwin pays tribute to Aesop's wisdom both in his Treatise of Morall Philosophie and in the Argument to Beware the Cat—but the folly and bestial desires that lurk behind the facade of conformity demanded by the Protestant state; not the light of wisdom but the darkness of ignorance and superstition. And the potential of such ignorance to blight the growth of wisdom is demonstrated by Streamer's success in smuggling his superstitions into the very heart of the Protestant printing community.

Indeed, Streamer's narrative makes it unsettlingly clear that he is by no means the only enemy to have infiltrated Protestant territory in the reign of Edward VI. The first part of his ‘oration’ opens with a little excursion into etymology, where Streamer speculates on the origins of the name of the place, ‘Aldersgate’, where John Day has his printing shop (p. 9). He suggests that it may have been named after the elders or ‘ancient men’ who built it, or after the elder trees that grew nearby, or after Aluredus (King Alfred)—and John Stowe took the second of these speculations seriously enough to refute it in his Survey of London (see Beware the Cat, p. 9, 5-23n.). But the one thing that emerges from this glimpse into linguistic history is that the names on the map of England enshrine ongoing disputes between ‘heralds’ and ‘historiers’ over competing versions of history.¹⁷ The English language itself is something of a site of struggle between opposed interest groups, and is subject to constant alteration and reinterpretation.

English is, moreover, only one of a multitude of languages spoken in the Tudor demesnes. The antiquarian John Leland had drawn attention to this fact when he learned the Celtic languages before undertaking his itinerary through England and Wales in the reign of Henry VIII. John Leland's contemporary, an eccentric priest called Andrew Boorde, again drew attention to the linguistic diversity of the Western islands, and of London in particular, in his Introduction of knowledge (1547). ‘In England, and under the dominion of England’, Boorde writes,

be many sondry speches beside Englyshe: there is Frenshe used in England, specyally at Calys, Gernsey, and Jersey: In Englande, the Walshe tongue is in Wales, The Cornyshe tongue in Cornewall, and Iryshe in Irlande, and Frenche in the Englysshe pale. There is also the Northen tongue, the whyche is trew Scotysshe; and the Scottes tongue is the Northen tongue. Furthermore, in England is used all maner of languages and speches of alyens in divers Cities and Townes, specyally in London by the Sea syde.¹⁸

Streamer receives painful confirmation of this linguistic diversity when he first takes his potion in the second part of the narrative. As soon as he has finished administering the drug, Streamer finds himself half-deafened by the cacophony of bestial and human languages that assaults his hearing: ‘such a mixture as I think was never in Chaucer's House of Fame … barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, rumbling of rats, gaggling of geese, humming of bees, rousing of bucks, gaggling of ducks … curling of frogs, and toads in the bogs’ (pp. 31-2)—an outbreak of Rabelaisian heteroglossia so confusing that he is forced to cover his ears with medicinal pillows before he can distinguish one sound from another. There could hardly be a more vivid metaphor for the multiplicity of competing discourses, religions, regional interests, and political factions that fragmented the Tudor territories during the troubled reign of Edward VI. The passing allusion to Chaucer's House of Fame—the imaginary mansion to which all the sounds in the world make their way, where true and false versions of history sit side by side on triumphal pillars and false and true rumours collide and combine—suggests that Streamer's London is a latter-day Babel, where sincerity and hypocrisy, irresponsible rumour and accurate report, are as difficult to disentangle as the elements of Streamer's personality. For the Tudor Protestant reader, Babel was Babylon and Babylon the Church of Rome. The confusion of tongues which fragments London warns of its kinship to the chief Italian city, which, as Baldwin informed his readers in Wonderfull Newes of the Death of Paul the III, ‘is not nowe Rome, but Babylon the disworship of al christendom’ (sig. C3^v), where Catholics ‘strive and fight among themselves’ for the spoils left behind by the dead Pope (sig. C4^r). In Wonderfull Newes, Catholic disunity was taken as a sign of the imminent collapse of the Roman religion. In Beware the Cat, English disunity might indicate instead the imminent failure of the Protestant reformation.

Of all the Tudor demesnes, Baldwin chooses Ireland as representative of the worst results of linguistic and political fragmentation. One of the first encounters with cats described in the book occurs in a story told by the gossip-monger Thomas, a man, we are told, who ‘had been in Ireland’ (p. 11). Thomas tells of a fatal incident he has heard of which took place in ‘an Irish town’ (p. 12) some forty years before Streamer's time, during one of the periodic conflicts between two groups of Catholics, the native Irish and the descendants of Anglo-Norman settlers known as the ‘Old English’.¹⁹ An adherent of the Old English faction has the misfortune to kill a cat called Grimalkin, who turns out to be the female monarch or pontiff of her species. Her death is avenged soon after by a ferocious kitten, which strangles Grimalkin's assassin, her master, in his own home, in full view of his family. At their peripheries, then, the Tudor territories are shown to be torn apart by internal divisions which flare up from time to time in seemingly random acts of violence, perpetrated in the safest of havens, the private household, by trusted retainers—or even pets. Whole areas of Ireland, we learn, have been reduced to economic ruin by the cattle raids and skirmishes that accompany such internal divisions. English readers of Beware the Cat might have found their preconceptions of Ireland as a remote wilderness untouched by civilization comfortably confirmed by this unpleasant little anecdote.

But as the book unfolds, it becomes increasingly clear that similar divisions exist at the heart of the Tudor state as well as at its margins. The ‘wild Irishmen’ (p. 13) would seem to have become thoroughly domesticated in England in the form of Grimalkin's people, the cats—a species which has as much in common with the Irish as with the English Catholics whose persecution has driven them underground. The connection between cats and Catholics is made explicit in the first part of Streamer's narrative. There is, of course, the obvious pun: the word ‘Catholic’ contains the word ‘cat’ like a lurking informer. In addition, the feline monarch Grimalkin is compared to the Pope ‘in whose cause all his clergy would not only scratch and bite, but kill and burn to powder’ (p. 15). Cats, like Catholics, speak a language which is not accessible to the bulk of Edward's human subjects; both cats and Catholics have an efficient international communications network; and cats and clandestine Catholics meet at night. But the cats' connections with the Irish are made equally explicit. The prince of cats, Grimalkin, not only lives in Ireland but speaks the Irish tongue (she ‘said in Irish, “Shane foel”, which is, “give me some meat’”, p. 13).²⁰ In this way she reminds Baldwin's readers of the linguistic gulf which separates the Old English from the ‘wild Irishmen’, and which was taken by the Tudor authorities to be one of the principal factors underlying continued Irish resistance to Tudor rule.²¹ Grimalkin's followers also share with the Irish (as Thomas portrays them) a predisposition to sudden violence, an unswerving devotion to their religion, and an excessive respect for the powers of witches (Grimalkin, Thomas assumes, is a witch in disguise). And their occupation of English as well as Irish households brings the two nations into unexpected and alarming proximity.

This proximity is confirmed by the extraordinary ease with which cats can convey messages across the Irish sea: almost as soon as it has happened, news of Grimalkin's assassination is passed from cat to cat through the unwitting mouths of their bewildered owners on either side of the water. Witches, too, are at first associated exclusively with contemporary Ireland (‘in Ireland, as they have been ere this in England, witches are for fear had in high reverence’, p. 17), but soon turn out to be as common in modern Oxford as in Bantry. Both ‘English witches and Irish witches’, Thomas claims, ‘may and do turn themselves into cats’ (p. 20), and an Oxford scholar has informed him that he met one in his home town when he was a child. It is not so long, in fact, since England was as firmly in the grip of superstition as Ireland is now. ‘We silly fools long time’, Thomas observes, ‘for his sly and crafty juggling, reverenced the Pope, thinking him to have been but a man … whereas indeed he was a very incarnated devil, like as this Grimalkin was an incarnate witch’ (pp. 20-1). And those superstitious days are not yet over. The third part of the book, as we have seen, contains plenty of examples of the reverence in which Papist ‘magic’ is still held in Edwardian England. And if the links between Protestant England and Catholic Ireland are not already clear enough, Streamer himself places them beyond question. In the second part of the book he utters a few words of Irish to add potency to his magic potion, something mentioned neither by his sixteenth-century ‘editor’, Baldwin, nor his twentieth-century editors, Ringler and Flachmann. As he kills the two animals which will form the basis of his ‘medicine’, he utters two incantations, both of which begin with the Irish word for Devil (‘Javol’ and ‘Shavol’ in Baldwin's orthography; ‘diabhal’ in modern Irish).²² He thus brings the superstition and devil-worship which had in the first part been relegated to the furthest corners of Edward's territories—and to a period nearly forty years before Edward was born—abruptly into the present, and into the heart of Edward's capital city.

In uttering his incantations Streamer effects, in fact, another kind of translation: the displacement of peoples or customs from one geographical location to another, which was one of the principal Tudor policies for the subjugation of the Irish. Three decades after Baldwin's death, in A View of the State of Ireland, Edmund Spenser recommended the ‘translation’ of Irish families from one region to another as part of his proposal for breaking down resistance to Elizabethan control in Ireland. He also recommended the eradication of the Irish language both inside and beyond the English pale: ‘For it hath ever beene the use of the conquerour, to despise the language of the conquered, and to force him by all meanes to learne his.’²³ On the evidence of Beware the Cat, on the other hand, translation at the end of Edward's reign is going the other way: the language, the customs, and even the persons of the conquered (in the shape of feline shape-shifters) are superimposing themselves by stealth on the conquerors, and England as a whole may be about to succumb to the fate of the Old English as Spenser saw it: that is, a return to its former wildness.

Symptoms of this wildness are already beginning to manifest themselves. For one thing, in England as in Ireland the divided loyalties of the inhabitants are liable to erupt at any time in acts of violence. At the beginning of his narrative, Streamer inveighs at some length against the common practice of displaying the dismembered bodies of criminals on the roofs of the city gates. In the three or four years before Baldwin wrote Beware the Cat, corpses mounted on the Aldersgate outside John Day's printing shop included the remains of rebels from the West country who had participated in the so-called Prayerbook Rebellion of 1549.²⁴ According to the priests who acted as its spokesmen, the western insurrection had its roots in Catholic opposition to the imposition of Protestant linguistic policy in the shape of the first Edwardian prayer-book. Many Cornish men and women, so the priests argued, spoke no English, so that the replacement of Latin with English in the liturgy merely substituted a familiar for an unfamiliar and therefore less accessible text.²⁵ Baldwin's employer, Edward Whitchurch, had printed that prayer-book; so Baldwin might be expected to have been acutely sensitive to these grisly reminders of the violence which could accompany what we might call the Englishing of the English.

The corpses also furnish material proof, so Streamer suggests, of the pervasive presence of Satanism in his native country. According to Streamer it was malignant blood-sucking spirits who first put it into the heads of tyrants to ‘mangle and boil Christian transgressors and to set up their quarters for them to feed upon’ (p. 10). The continuation of this diabolical practice in sixteenth-century London forms part of an accumulating body of evidence of the contempt in which religion is held in Edwardian England—and, implicitly, of the existence of ‘heathen tyrants’ in the Edwardian government. The displaying of dead bodies overnight, Streamer reminds us, is ‘against Scripture’ (p. 10) since it was forbidden to Moses; and a later marginal comment suggests that such contempt for ancient laws sets the modern ‘civil’ English below the level of the Irish, since ‘the wild Irishmen were better than we in reverencing their religion’ (p. 13). Baldwin's readers may have seen the turbulence of Edward's reign as symptomatic of a general religious decline; and the turbulence was getting worse. By early 1553 the prospect of nation-wide civil war was closer, if anything, than it had been in 1549, as the Dudleys struggled to consolidate their power in anticipation of the young king's death. Nervous Londoners may have suspected that England stood in imminent danger of becoming another ‘waste wilderness’ (p. 12), as bleak as the Irish countryside from Clonmines to Ross.

At the close of his lament for the death of Edward, The Funeralles of King Edward the Sixt—‘penned’, Baldwin tells us, ‘before his corse was buryed’ (sig. A1^v),²⁶ but not printed till 1560—Baldwin added a little note which throws some light on his own state of mind at the end of the young king's reign. The poem tells of God's decision to punish the godlessness of his chosen people (the English, of course) by killing their virtuous monarch, an act which had an effect precisely the opposite of what Protestants would have hoped for, in that it resulted in the transference of power in England from the Protestants to the Catholics under Mary I. The poem reminds us that this is not the first time England has been ‘translated’ from one power to another, as its ancient name ought to remind us: the island was ‘Cald Britaine once, til time that peoples sin / Drave out them selves and brought straunge nacions in’ (sig. A4^r). And Baldwin concludes with a warning in prose similar to the exhortation to ‘beware the cat’ which closes his earlier prose narrative. With an eye fixed, no doubt, on Mary's Spanish family connections, Baldwin writes prophetically: ‘because of unrighteous dealing, of wrong, of blasphemies, and sundry deceytes, a Realme shalbe translated from one people to an other’ (sig. C2^v; my emphasis). Beware the Cat warns its readers that the process of translation is already under way as Edward drifts towards death. The English dominions are as full of strangers, speaking strange tongues, as they are of cats; and it is only a matter of time before one or other of these alien tongues supplants the dominant language. And when that disastrous translatio imperii takes place, Baldwin implies, there will be very few scholars either able or willing to resist it.

Oddly enough, it is only the peculiarly ambiguous cats who stand between the imminent prospect of this kind of national translation and the successful accomplishment of the reformation in England. The cats seem to represent different things at different times. Despite their similarity to Catholics they are not themselves Catholic, since they spend much of their time exposing clandestine Catholic practices to the public gaze. Nor are they altogether Protestant, since they adore a feline Pope. They translate their shapes with alarming ease: nobody knows whether their cat is an ordinary cat, or a witch in disguise, or a girl under a curse, or ‘the Devil's cat, which cannot be tied up’ (p. 55). All we know of the cats is that they will expose whatever is done in secret, by Catholic, Protestant, devil-worshipper, or fraud. Baldwin urges his dedicatee, Master John Young, to beware of having his faults exposed by cats (p. 4), as vehemently as he urges Catholics and hypocrites to ‘Beware the Cat’ in the ‘Exhortation’ which closes the book (pp. 54-5).²⁷ Mouse-slayer alone, we learn, has worked her way through a representative slice of Edwardian society: her owners have included a priest, a baker, a lawyer, a broker, a butcher, a bishop, a knight, a pothecary, a goldsmith, a usurer, an alchemist, and a lord; and she has endless revelations to make about their ‘cruelty, study, craft, cunning, niggishness, folly, waste, and oppression’ (p. 52), if only we could have Streamer's luck in overhearing the rest of her autobiography. The list promises another satire on the scale of Piers Plowman whenever a suitable translator can be found in the right place and at the right time to record her observations.²⁸

The shape-changing, all-seeing cats have been read by critics in a number of ways. They have been taken as embodiments of the Protestant conscience, hunting out the hidden corners of the English mind which still clung to age-old superstitions. And they have been read as figuring the dangerous ease with which rational men and women are capable of exchanging natures with savage and sexually profligate beasts.²⁹ I would add that the cats might stand for the unceasing and multifarious processes of translation: processes which will in the end providentially translate ‘all unbelevers’ to the truth contained in the Scriptures. ‘Translation’ could mean ‘interpretation’ or ‘commentary’ in Baldwin's time, and the cats who provide a commentary on the secret lives of Catholics are themselves commented on in Baldwin's text by the marginal gloss which accompanies Streamer's narrative.³⁰ At crucial moments, as we have seen, this gloss makes clear the Protestant position on actions and words which Streamer is too obtuse, or too steeped in hypocrisy, to recognize as potentially Catholic or diabolical. In addition, translation could mean ‘metaphor’, as Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) reminds us. Wilson gives as ‘the seconde kinde of translation’, or metaphor, ‘when we goo from the creature wythout reason, to that whiche hathe reason, or contrarye from that whiche hath reason, to that whiche hath no reason’.³¹ Later in his discussion of rhetorical figures, Wilson develops the more disturbing connotations of comparing a human being to ‘that whiche hath no reason’. His illustration of the art of amplification or ‘enlarging examples by copye’ takes the form of a lengthy attack on the vice of ingratitude, which bases its argument on a series of examples of beasts who have shown extraordinary gratitude to men. ‘That which bruite Beastes have doone’, it begins, ‘shalt thou being a man seme not to have done? … They became of beastes in bodye, men in nature, and wilt thou become of a man in bodye, a Beaste in nature? … Shamed be that wretche that goeth agaynst nature, that onelye hath the shape of a man, and in nature is worse then a beast. Yea, worthye are all suche rather to be torne with devils, then to live with men’ (pp. 386-7). Baldwin echoes this rebuke in his commentary on the third part of Beware the Cat, where Mouse-slayer defends herself against charges of having broken feline law: ‘Cats have laws among them’, says the gloss, ‘which they keep better than we do ours’ (p. 46). At this point English men and women have been translated to a level below that of the beasts, just as in the first part of the narrative their religious indifference placed them below the level of the devout ‘wild Irishmen’. The English, we learn, may be ‘altered and translated’ as readily as a word in Wilson's treatise may be altered from its ‘proper and naturall meanynge’. And in Edward's time, it seems, such alterations are invariably Circean ones: metamorphoses from the rational to the subbestial engineered by the protean powers of Catholic conjurers, witches, and incarnate devils.

This translation of the English is capable of being exposed through translation between languages, as the Exhortation at the end of the book insists:

Wherefore, seeing [Streamer] hath in his oration proved that cats do understand us and mark our secret doings, and so declare them among themselves; that through help of the medicines by him described any man may, as he did, understand them; I would counsel all men to take heed of wickedness, and eschew secret sins and mischievous counsels, lest, to their shame, all the world at length do know thereof.

(p. 54)

The Englishing of obscure texts, says the Exhortation, and the elucidation of such Englished texts in commentaries, impart to the human reader a measure of the omniscience of God and his angels, ‘which see, mark, and behold all men's closest doings’, or the legalistic cunning of the Devil, ‘which will we or nill we seeth and writeth all our ill doings’ (p. 54; my emphasis). Any clandestine conversation may be overheard, understood, and written down; and once it has been written down, there is nothing to prevent its becoming known to ‘all the world’ through the medium of print. This, after all, has been the fate of Master Streamer's oration: Baldwin transcribed it, printed it, and added his marginal notes before Streamer had a chance to put it into publishable form himself. Printers, like cats, are irrepressible disseminators of sensitive information: both Baldwin's employer Edward Whitchurch and his friend John Day had been arrested early in their careers for printing seditious tracts, and neither had found his career much damaged by attempts to restrain him. Beware the Cat, then, which locates itself so precisely at the heart of the English printing industry, is in the end an astonishingly sophisticated celebration of the powers of the new information technology: above all, its power to impart either ‘shame’ or ‘glory’ to its authors and their subjects, whatever their stated ideological affiliations. As such, it is an early modern text which speaks directly to readers at the close of the twentieth century.

Notes

1. Modern studies of Baldwin's narrative owe a great debt to the excellent edition by William A. Ringler and Michael Flachmann, Beware the Cat: The First English Novel (San Marino, CA, 1988). All my references to Baldwin's text are taken from this edition. I am also much indebted to John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton, 1982), Ch. 8: ‘William Baldwin and the Satirist's Art’. My argument here develops and amends my discussion of Beware the Cat in my Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford, 1997), Ch. 2. Stephen Gresham, ‘William Baldwin: Literary Voice of the Reign of Edward VI’, HLQ, 44 (1980-1), 101-16, contains a valuable survey of Baldwin's life and works. Otherwise, articles on Baldwin have concentrated for the most part on matters of genre and narrative technique. See Nancy A. Guttierez, ‘Beware the Cat: Mimesis in a Skin of Oratory’, Style, 23 (1989), 49-69; Terence N. Bowers, ‘The Production and Communication of Knowledge in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat: Toward a Typographic Culture’, Criticism, 33 (1991), 1-29; and Edward T. Bonahue Jr, ‘“I know the place and the persons”: The Play of Textual Frames in Baldwin's Beware the Cat’, SP, 91 (1994), 283-300.

2. On Beware the Cat as a satire on the doctrine of transubstantiation see Ringler and Flachmann's edition, pp. 17.35-19.31n., which states that ‘the fundamental fictional construct of Beware the Cat’ is that ‘belief in the physical efficacy of the mass is as absurd as belief in animals having the power of speech’.

3. For the association of youth with Protestantism (and, conversely, of old age with fidelity to the old religion) in Tudor England, see Susan Brigden, ‘Youth and the English Reformation’, in Rebellion, Popular Protest and the Social Order in Early Modern England, edited by Paul Slack (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 77-107.

4. For Jerome's and Augustine's discussions of translating the Scriptures see Western Translation Theory, edited by Douglas Robinson (Manchester, 1997), pp. 23-30 and 31-4. The same book contains Erasmus' defence of his translation of the New Testament against accusations that he had set about to ‘publicly correct and alter the Vulgate text’—that is, that he had rewritten it—without seeking ecclesiastical approval (p. 66). Robinson also includes chapters from Sir Thomas More's A Dialogue Concerning Heresies and Matters of Religion (1529), in which More attacks the Wycliffite translation of the Bible as a malicious revision of the Scriptures.

5. Janel Mueller, ‘A Tudor Queen Finds Voice: Katherine Parr's Lamentation of a Sinner’, in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays in Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, edited by Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (Chicago, 1988), pp. 15-47 (p. 21).

6. Roger Ascham, English Works, edited by William Aldis Wright (Cambridge, 1904), pp. 159-60.

7. ‘Than they have in more reverence, the triumphes of Petrarche: than the Genesis of Moses: They make more account of Tullies offices, than S. Paules epistles: of a tale in Bocace, than a storie of the Bible’ (English Works, p. 232). I discuss Ascham's objections to Italian fiction at greater length in Ch. 1 of Elizabethan Fictions (n. 1).

8. The ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ is signed ‘G. B.’ (Gulielmus Baldwin). Ringler and Flachmann point out that Baldwin's ‘personal motto “Love and Live’” was ‘appended to all of his works’ (p. xxviii). Baldwin is best known in the twentieth century as the editor of The Mirror for Magistrates (1559), one of the most popular and influential poetry collections of the sixteenth century.

9. The phrase cited occurs in the 1556 edition of the Treatise, sig. A3^r. For the work's popularity see A Treatise of Morall Philosophie, edited by Robert Hood Bowers (Gainesville, 1967), p. v.

10. In the 1556 edition Baldwin writes: ‘as I said and say still in the fifth chapter of my fyrste booke, the chefest cause why I did put it furthe was to provoke other, more learnedlye to handle my rude beginnyngs … I hoped that sum learned therin woulde have perused the Rabbines, sum other the Romaynes, sum other the Sages of oure owne countrey, and have generally gathered together theyr lives and sentences, and therout made suche lyke and better volumes’ (sig. A3^r). I discuss the Treatise of Morall Philosophie at greater length in ‘William Baldwin and the Politics of Pseudo-philosophy in Tudor Prose Fiction’, forthcoming in Studies in Philology.

11. Quoted from Western Translation Theory (n. 4), p. 76.

12. For Baldwin's ‘satire of oral traditions’ see Beware the Cat, p. xviii.

13. Baldwin's admiration for Streamer is evinced by his intention to act as his amanuensis in future, ‘as Plato did by Socrates’ (p. 3).

14. See Donald R. Kelley, ‘Ideas of Resistance before Elizabeth’, in The Historical Renaissance (n. 5), pp. 48-76 (p. 61).

15. See The Canticles or Balades of Salomon, sig. C3^r: ‘The Church beyng in the wine seller of Goddes hollye wurde, and seyng therin the banner of his love whiche he displayed for her, whan he gave up his body to the crosse, and suffered with horrible payne and panges of death, his blud to be shed and powred furth, only for her sake, to pourge and cleanse her from all spot and wrincle, and to make her of his foule enemie his fayer Spouse, is so ravished with beholding his mercy, that desirous to have all people love hym she brasteth furth in her panges, syngyng to the Younglinges’: the poem follows.

16. Their suspicions would no doubt have been strengthened by the unexpected association of Streamer's name with the fake love letter shown by the brothel-keeper to the virtuous young wife in the third part of his narrative (pp. 43-4). The letter is signed ‘G.S.’, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this stands for ‘Gregory Streamer’. One of Streamer's sidelines, it appears, consists of composing seductive billets doux for other people, and at least one of these amorous texts has effected a diabolical conversion.

17. See Beware the Cat, p. 9: ‘most part of heralds, I know, will soonest assent that Aluredus builded this; but they are deceived … But whereofsoever this gate Aldersgate took the name … longeth chiefly to historiers to know.’ A similar competition between historians and heralds is fought out in the pages of The Mirror for Magistrates. In the tragedy of Owen Glendower, the Percy-Glendower rebellion against Henry IV is sparked off by the willingness of ‘Haroldes’ to pander to the desires of the rebels by tailoring their family ‘badges and … creastes’ to fit the predictions of a false prophet. Baldwin develops this theme in his tragedy of George, Duke of Clarence: see The Mirror for Magistrates, edited by Lily B. Campbell (New York, 1960), pp. 127 and 227-8. Historians, by contrast, labour to ‘diswade from vices and exalte vertue’, and leave the petty factual details of history to ‘the determinacion of the Haroldes’ (p. 110). It would seem, then, that Baldwin's disapproval of heralds springs from the absence of moral purpose behind their genealogical researches.

18. Andrew Boorde's Introduction and Dietary, edited by F. J. Furnivall (London, 1870), p. 120. My thanks to Dr. Willy Maley of the University of Glasgow for drawing my attention to Boorde's work.

19. I owe my awareness of early modern Irish history to my colleague Willy Maley. For a brief account of Old English and the ‘multilingual environment’ in Tudor Ireland, see his Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity (Basingstoke, 1997), Ch. 2. Among other things, Dr. Maley's book sets Spenser's work in the context of recent postcolonial theory. The present analysis of Beware the Cat is intended to suggest that Baldwin's text could profitably be read in the same context.

20. Baldwin's Irish seems here to be accurate, although its orthography makes it confusing. Andrew Boorde gives a translation of the phrase ‘Wyfe, gyve me fleshe’ in his Introduction of knowledge (n. 18), p. 134: ‘Benytee, toor foeule’, and Boorde's translation has allowed Prof. Seán Ó Coileáin of University College, Cork, to speculate as to the meaning of Baldwin's phrase. I quote from a letter from Prof. Ó Coileáin, with thanks to him and to Prof. Tom McAlindon for looking into the matter on my behalf: ‘The parallel phrase “Benytee, toor foeule!” would seem at first to be of little help, while in itself perfectly transparent, being a fairly good phonetic rendering of “[A]b[h]ean an tí, tabhair [dom] feoil”, “woman of the house, give [me] meat”, which is not too far from the translation supplied. “Foel” and “Foeule” are clearly the same word, viz., Irish “feoil”. “Shane” could well stand for Irish “sín”, one meaning of which is “to give”. “Sín [dom/chugam] feoil”, “give [me] meat”, would then correspond exactly to “tabhair [dom] feoil”, both in sense and construction, with the omission of the conjugated preposition, “dom”, in each case.’

21. For an account of Tudor policies on the Irish language see Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translation, Languages, Cultures (Cork, 1996), Ch. 2, especially pp. 48-9.

22. The phrases are: ‘Shavol swashmeth, gorgona Iiscud’ and ‘Javol sheleg hutotheca Iiscud’ (Beware the Cat, p. 26). ‘Sheleg’ sounds like Irish ‘seilg’, ‘hunting’. I am very grateful to Prof. C. N. O'Dochartaigh of the University of Glasgow for pointing out the presence of these Irish words in the two phrases, and for much additional help with the Irish context of Beware the Cat.

23. A View of the State of Ireland, edited by Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford, 1997), p. 70.

24. See Beware the Cat, p. 10 (13n.).

25. For the rebels' demands and Cranmer's response to them see A. L. Rowse, Tudor Cornwall: Portrait of a Society (London, 1941), pp. 271-3.

26. Quotations are from the Roxburghe Club edition (London, 1817).

27. King, English Reformation Literature (n. 1), p. 388, maintains that the phrase ‘Beware the Cat’ is ‘a made-up proverb’; it does not occur in the standard reference books. But the phrase occurs in Skelton's Speak Parrot: ‘Ware the cat, Parrot, ware the false cat!’ (The Complete Poems of John Skelton Laureate, edited by Philip Henderson (London, 1959), p. 291). Skelton's polyglottal parrot speaks ‘Latin, Hebrew, Araby and Chaldy’, like Gregory Streamer. It seems possible, then, that Baldwin's satire was partly inspired by Skelton's.

28. On the importance of Piers Plowman as a prototype for Protestant satire see King, English Reformation Literature, pp. 319-39 and passim.

29. See King, pp. 388, 393-4. He also suggests that ‘The all-seeing vision of the cat may serve as a figure for both the providence of God and the vigilance of the devil’ (p. 406).

30. For Renaissance conceptions of translation as, among other things, ‘(1) the act of conveying a document into a language other than its original’ and ‘(2) the interpretation of what the original document meant’, see Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln, NE, 1989), Ch. 10, especially pp. 318 and 326.

31. Arte of Rhetorique, edited by Thomas J. Derrick (New York, 1982), p. 346.