SOURCE: Ringler, William A., Jr., and Michael Flachmann. Introduction to Beware the Cat by William Baldwin: The First English Novel, pp. xiii-xxviii. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1988.

[In the following essay, Ringler and Flachmann provide background on the rise of fictional prose narrative and the career of Baldwin before discussing the narrative art of Beware the Cat, which the critics contend is one of the best productions of sixteenth-century European fiction.]

The long fictional narrative in prose, what is now called the “novel,” has been the dominant literary form in the west since the eighteenth century, although it was the latest to be developed in most literatures of the world. To study the art of narrative in earlier times, we must examine works composed in verse—especially the epic and the romance—because the history of earlier literatures confirms that the more highly organized rhythms of verse invariably preceded the looser rhythms of prose. This is not to say that primitive peoples did not tell one another stories in prose, but rather that they ordinarily did not elaborate them and record them in that medium (except for short anecdotes, such as the fables attributed to Aesop or the story told by Herodotus of the clever thief who deceived Rhampsinitus). Since verse is more easily memorized than prose, an oral society could more accurately hand down longer works if they were structured metrically. And even after the invention of writing, at first only literary works in verse were considered of sufficient dignity to merit the labor of being recorded.

Prose fiction itself came late to England, with original prose fiction later still. Not until the second third of the sixteenth century did England produce an original work of prose fiction of more than short-story length (see the appendix of this book for a history of English prose narratives written prior to 1558). All the preceding longer works had been translations, or at best adaptations, of narratives originally written in French, Latin, German, Dutch, or Greek. The earliest work that approaches being original fiction is Sir Thomas Elyot's Image of Governance (1541), a compilation of the “acts and sentences notable” of the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus. Sir Thomas boasted that his work was history, a translation of an ancient Greek manuscript, but the contents were partly compiled and partly invented by Elyot himself. Though his work is semi-fictional, it contains scant narrative. Rather than providing an account of the events of the emperor's reign, Elyot merely furnishes a collection of letters and speeches illustrating points of public policy.

Another partly original work of fiction is the popular Scoggin's Jests, written by Andrew Borde prior to 1549. This is a compilation of seventy-eight short anecdotes, ranging in length from two or three sentences to two or three pages; many of the stories were drawn from identifiable sources, while others were taken from oral tradition or invented by Borde himself. The jest books, the earliest and best of which was A Hundred Merry Tales (1525), were collections of detached jokes and humorous brief narratives.¹ In Scoggin's Jests, Borde attempted to give unity and coherence to a variety of anecdotes by attaching them to a fictional character, the Oxford scholar and wandering jester Tom Scoggin, who eventually entered the service of the king of England and later the king of France.

These detached anecdotes of the late medieval jest books, when collected under the name of a single character such as Til Eulenspiegel, Virgilius, or the Parson of Kalenberg, become the forerunners of the picaresque novel and other pseudo-biographical works of fiction. But original English examples of this genre featuring a single, unified narrative did not appear until much later, in the 1590s, which saw publication of the anonymous Long Meg of Westminster and the popular stories of London artisans and merchants written by Thomas Deloney. Although he took some of his episodes from the jest books, Deloney attached them to more completely realized characters in a clearly drawn social setting and structured them according to a more definite plot line. In contrast, Borde's Scoggin is not consistently delineated (he is sometimes a scheming confidence man, while at other times he plays tricks for fun); although he is made a participant in each episode, the incidents are seldom linked together in a logical sequence of action. Until William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, written in the first half of 1553, we can find no original work of English fiction of more than short-story length in which we see consistent character portrayal and a sequence of events that form a coherent plot.

WILLIAM BALDWIN

Baldwin has established a permanent place in the annals of English literature as the editor and main author of the verse narratives collected in A Mirror for Magistrates (1559). His contribution to the history of prose fiction, however, has been strangely ignored.² In fact, no history of the novel, from John C. Dunlop in 1814 to Paul Salzman in 1985, pays any attention to Baldwin. This neglect deserves remedy, because Beware the Cat is not only the first original work of longer prose fiction in English, but it is also of considerable artistic excellence—which makes it more interesting and more entertaining than most of the prose works in English immediately following it.

William Baldwin—who was in turn a poet, printer, prose writer, and preacher—was of Welsh descent, though the identity of his parents and the date and place of his birth are unknown.³ A “William Baulden” supplicated for the B.A. at Oxford in January of 1532/3, yet no record exists of his admission to the degree.⁴ Whether this is a form of the name “Baldwin,” and if so whether this William was our author, is uncertain because the name, which appears in a variety of spellings, was quite common during the sixteenth century. His later publications show him to be an educated man, though he could have acquired his learning through a combination of grammar school and private study, rather than through attending a university. The earliest confirmed biographical information we have concerning Baldwin is that he was an assistant to the publisher Edward Whitchurch from 1547 until 1553. Whitchurch was a London merchant who, because of his commitment to the Protestant Reformation, became a publisher and with Richard Grafton issued the earliest editions of the English Bible. About 1545, Whitchurch bought what had been Wynkyn de Worde's printing house at the Sun in Fleet Street, and from then until the accession of the Roman Catholic Queen Mary in July 1553 he published sixty-eight books—mainly Bibles, primers, editions of the metrical versions of the Psalms, the first and second Prayer Books of Edward VI, other religious works, and the writings of his “servant” William Baldwin. Like his employer, Baldwin was clearly a dedicated supporter of the Protestant Reformation and a violent opponent of Roman Catholicism.

Baldwin's first known publication, which appeared in April of 1547/8, was a commendatory sonnet (the first English sonnet to appear in print) prefixed to Christopher Langton's treatise entitled The Principal Parts of Physic, which was printed by Whitchurch. In January 1547/8 he published A Treatise of Moral Philosophy in four books, also printed by Whitchurch, which he dedicated to the eight-year-old son of Protector Somerset. Baldwin's most popular book, this Tudor compendium of ancient philosophy went through twenty-five editions by 1651.⁵

In June 1549 he issued The Canticles or Ballads of Solomon in English Meters, “Imprinted at London by William Baldwin servaunt with Edward Whitchurche,” which he dedicated to the eleven-year-old King Edward VI. Three years later, he translated from Latin the libellous Wonderful News of the Death of Paul the Third, in which the supposed satirical author, P. Esquillus (Pasquil), pretends to follow the soul of the late pope to hell where his crimes are engraved on pillars of adamant.⁶ In accordance with conventional Protestant interpretation, the Church of Rome is identified with the scarlet woman who rode upon the seven-headed beast in Revelation 17, and Pope Paul III is accused of murder, incest, bribery, and oppression of Lutherans. That Baldwin chose to translate this work shows the virulence of his anti-papal feelings. From it he learned the effectiveness of first-person narrative as a vehicle for religious satire.

Judging from his dedication of the Treatise of Moral Philosophy to the son of the Protector and the Canticles of Solomon to the king himself, Baldwin appears to have hoped for employment at court. But such an appointment was not immediately forthcoming, because four months later Somerset fell from power and was eventually executed. Finally, during the Christmas season of 1552/3, Baldwin was asked to work at court as an actor, deviser of entertainments, and provider of stage properties under the Master of the King's Pastimes, George Ferrers. The Revels Accounts for December through June of this period record his activities.⁷ In a letter written in early December 1552, Ferrers specified that he needed a “divine,” an “astronomer,” and others in his train—a statement that agrees with the Argument of Beware the Cat, which explains that Streamer and Willot were Ferrers' “divine” and “astronomer.” On 27 December, Ferrers requested “Irish apparel for a man and a woman,” while subsequent accounts for January and February record properties for a “Mask of Cats” and “An Irish Play of the State of Ireland” by Baldwin to be presented before the king. Because of the king's illness, the mask and play were postponed from 2 February until 2 April; they may, in fact, never have been performed at all, since young Edward died on 6 July and, after the brief reign of the unfortunate Queen Jane, Queen Mary ascended the throne, overthrew the Reformation, and restored Roman Catholicism as England's national religion. During this time of political and religious turmoil in the early months of 1553, Baldwin composed his most important work of prose fiction, Beware the Cat, in which cats are principal actors and the early scenes are set in Ireland.

Since Beware the Cat is not only a fictional narrative but also a religious satire, some knowledge of the religious controversies of the time is necessary for readers to appreciate it fully. Luther had posted his theses at Wittenberg in 1517, and as a result Protestant doctrine spread rapidly through the German states, Switzerland, France, the northern Netherlands, and England. Though in 1534 Henry VIII broke administratively with the Church of Rome and proclaimed himself “supreme head in earth of the Church of England,” he remained outwardly a conservative in theology; consequently, only minor changes occurred in doctrine or liturgical observances during his reign (except for the publication of one English translation of the Bible). When the boy king Edward VI ascended the throne early in 1547, the Protector Somerset took over rule of the kingdom and favored the Protestants; later, under Northumberland, the more radical reformers were allowed full sway. Such an abrupt shift in religious sympathies is nowhere more evident than in the fate of Dr. Richard Smith, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, who in 1546 had published The Assertion and Defense of the Sacraments of the Altar—a defense, dedicated to King Henry VIII, of current Roman Catholic doctrine. In the early months of the reign of Henry's son, Smith also published A Treatise Setting Forth Diverse Truths Necessary to be Believed Which Are Not Expressed in the Scripture but Left to the Church by the Apostles' Tradition, for which he was immediately clapped into prison and forced to make public recantation of the ideas set forth in both books. During the rest of Edward's short reign, only Protestant tracts were allowed into print. Somerset had clearly established freedom of the press—but for Reformers only.

The main attacks levied by Protestants against the Church of Rome concerned what they considered to be the superstitious accretions imposed by Rome upon primitive (and therefore supposedly “pure”) Christian observances: that is, articles of belief and ritual not found in the text of the Bible but handed down through the “traditions” of the Church. Reformers criticized the veneration of saints, the issuance of indulgences, the celibacy of the clergy, the conducting of church services in Latin rather than in the vernacular, the celebration of the Mass itself (especially the attribution of any immediately practical efficacy), and, in the later part of Edward's reign, the doctrine of transubstantiation, which alleged the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

Attacks on the Mass reached their height in 1548, when the English printing presses poured forth thirty-two editions of twenty-three tracts and pamphlets against it. Early in 1549, Parliament approved the provisions of the first Prayer Book of Edward VI and ordered them in full force by Whit Sunday (the ninth of June). These required the destruction of images and the abolition of all observances and articles of belief based solely on “tradition.” The Latin Mass was abolished, and an English Communion Service was substituted in which the laity were allowed to receive communion in both kinds and in which the bread and wine were considered merely symbolic rather than real. Whitchurch printed his first edition of the Book of Common Prayer on 7 March 1549 and the revised version in the spring or early summer of 1552.

This background against which Beware the Cat was written is reflected in episode after episode ridiculing the many Catholic observances objected to by the Protestants—observances which, they asserted, stemmed from superstition and belief in magic. The numbers game played in the two accounts of the death of Grimalkin, for example, suggests the fantastic grounds upon which oral reports came to be credited and accepted as “unwritten verities”: in the first tale, a man had met a cat in Kankwood forty years ago who told him that Grimalkin was dead; and in the second, an Irish churl had reported to Thomas thirty-three years ago that Patrick Apore had had an adventure seven years prior to that in which he killed the fiend-like cat he met in the church. This satire of oral tradition is made even more obvious in Thomas' account of how witches hand down the secrets of their magic from mother to daughter, for Baldwin adds the marginal note, “Witchcraft is kin to unwritten verities, for both go by traditions.” Similarly, belief in the physical efficacy of the Mass is undermined by the story of the supposedly blind country woman who was cured by a sight of the sacramental wafer, while the adoration of images is mocked in the story of the old bawd who says her beads before a statue of the Virgin.

In the early months of 1553 young Edward VI became seriously ill, and it became obvious that he would soon be succeeded by his sister, the Roman Catholic Mary. Baldwin's employer Whitchurch was—with John Day, Richard Grafton, and William Seres—among the most prominent publishers of Protestant service books and anti-Catholic propaganda. In order to safeguard his financial assets, he deeded in June the contents of his printing house to the stationers William and Humphrey Powell, and the following October entered a writ of recovery against them through an intermediary.⁸ By this legal maneuver, Whitchurch was able to go into hiding and at the same time recover some of the capital of his business. His fears were prophetic, for on the accession of Queen Mary he was specifically excepted from the general pardon that she issued, and his friends Day and Seres were imprisoned.

Upon the death of Edward, Baldwin composed a long poem, The Funerals of King Edward the Sixth, which he did not dare publish until 1560, two years after the accession of Queen Elizabeth. Meanwhile, the operation of Whitchurch's shop was taken over by the scrivener John Wayland, who was granted, on 24 October 1553 (three months after the accession of Queen Mary), an exclusive patent for printing Roman Catholic primers—two weeks before Parliament had decided on the restoration of the old form. Baldwin apparently kept his religious opinions to himself, and he continued his employment in the same shop under Wayland, who in 1556 printed an updated sixth edition of Baldwin's Treatise of Moral Philosophy, which was intended to counter Paulfreyman's pirated edition then in circulation. Since copy for the new primer was not received until spring of 1555 (Wayland's first edition was dated June 4th), to keep his press and staff occupied Wayland prepared an edition of John Lydgate's Fall of Princes, adding to it a continuation prepared by Baldwin and others entitled A Memorial of Such Princes, as Since the Time of King Richard the Second, Have Been Unfortunate in the Realm of England. This edition was in print by September 1554 but was soon afterwards suppressed by the government (only a two-leaf fragment survives); it was not printed again until 1559 when, under Queen Elizabeth, it was newly titled A Mirror for Magistrates. The suppressed edition probably contained twenty-one “tragedies” of unfortunate Englishmen, ranging from Robert Tresilian (who died in 1388) to Edward IV (who died in 1483). Baldwin's friend George Ferrers provided four of these verse histories, Thomas Chaloner one, and Thomas Phaer another; a poem of earlier composition about Edward IV was attributed, no doubt wrongly, to John Skelton; and Baldwin himself may have composed most of the remaining fourteen poems. The 1559 Mirror contained only nineteen tragedies, though its table of contents listed twenty-one. Another edition in 1563 added eight more tragedies, two of which were by Baldwin, who had planned the new volume and had written the prose links between different sections. Eight editions of the Memorial or Mirror appeared between 1554 and 1609, making it one of the most influential collections of poems in Elizabeth's reign. Many other poems were modeled on Baldwin's Mirror, which was also important in shaping English history plays and English conceptions of dramatic tragedy.⁹

Queen Mary at first proceeded slowly and temperately with her restoration of Roman Catholicism. In February of 1554, however, Sir Thomas Wyatt (son of the poet) raised a rebellion in protest against her proposed marriage to Philip II of Spain. The government struck back swiftly, condemning Wyatt and forty-three of his followers to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, with their mutilated bodies set up on every gate of London as a warning to future traitors. In April, an unknown person hanged on the gallows in Cheapside a cat suited like a Mass priest with a shaven crown and a round piece of paper between its forefeet to represent the communion wafer.¹⁰ In February of the next year, the first Marian martyr, John Rogers, was burned at the stake; thereafter the fires flamed regularly in Smithfield and other parts of the country, until by the end of Mary's reign more than three hundred Protestants had been burned or had died in prison, while over eight hundred had fled the realm.

Despite his Protestant sympathies, Baldwin continued offering his plays for performance at the court of Queen Mary. In December of 1556, for example, he wrote to the Master of the Revels presenting him “a Comedie concerning the way to Lyfe, mete … to be played before the quene.”¹¹ It featured sixty-two characters, each of whose names began with the letter “L,” and would have taken three hours to perform. No evidence exists that his offer was accepted.

After the accession of Queen Elizabeth, Baldwin was “called to another trade of life” in January 1560 when he was ordained deacon; soon thereafter he undoubtedly became a priest when he was appointed vicar of Tortington in Sussex and later, in 1561, rector of St. Michael le Quern in Cheapside. He also continued his interest in publishing during this time, for in 1563 the London publisher Thomas Marsh engaged him to assist the antiquary John Stow in preparing an abridgment of English chronicles to supersede Grafton's. The end of Baldwin's life was near, however. During the latter half of 1563 the plague raged in London, and more than seventeen thousand people died—perhaps twenty per cent of the city's population. In September the Marian Roman Catholic bishops were removed from the Tower, where they had been imprisoned for protection from the plague, and put under house arrest in the country by the bishops who had succeeded them. In the same breath, Stow reported both the fate of the bishops and the demise of William Baldwin: “Their deliverance, or rather change of prison, did so much offend the people that the preachers at Paul's Cross and in other places … preached, as it was thought of many wise men very seditiously, as Baldwin at Paul's Cross, wishing a gallows set up in Smithfield and the old bishops and other papists hanged thereon. Himself died of the plague the next week after.”¹²

BALDWIN'S NARRATIVE ART

Though Baldwin does not appear from Stow's report to have been a kindly man, he was an unusually competent writer—more competent in prose than in verse. His principal prose work, Beware the Cat, first published seven years after his death, is not only the first original piece of long prose fiction in English, but it is also one of the best and most interesting works of its kind produced in the sixteenth century. Longer examples of English fiction before Baldwin were all translations or adaptations. As the first original writer in his field, Baldwin apparently borrowed little from his immediate predecessors. We can locate a few literary precedents, however. Thomas More, who led his readers to accept the marvels of Utopia by his matter-of-fact account of meeting the traveler Raphael Hythloday in the garden of his friend Peter Giles in Antwerp, may have provided a hint for Baldwin's circumstantial opening scene in the chamber of Master Ferrers on the 28th of December 1552. John Clerc's translation of Diego de San Pedro's Arnalte y Lucenda (1542) may have suggested the device of the first-person narrator who, in attempting to build himself up, unwittingly tears himself down. Similarly, Baldwin's own translation of Wonderful News of the Death of Paul the Third may have reminded him of the effectiveness of first-person narrative in religious satire. Caxton's translation of the Dutch Reynard the Fox (1481), a satirical story in which animals act like people, would seem to be a natural precursor to Beware the Cat; in contrast, however, Baldwin's cats act like cats—articulate felines possessing terrifying supernatural powers of evil. The components of a few of the episodes in Baldwin's story are borrowed. His tale of the Irish werewolf, for example, is from a manuscript of Giraldus Cambrensis' Topographia Hiberniae, his presciential pills from Tales and Quick Answers, and his old bawd and weeping cat from Caxton's Fables of Aesop. But Baldwin invented the main elements of his story himself, gave it a vivid setting in his own place and time, devised complicated and interesting ways of telling it, greatly advanced the art of characterization, and made his fiction a vehicle for important ideas.

The earlier romances had been set in unidentified, far-away places in times long past. But Baldwin blended enough sober fact with his outrageous fiction to provide a pretense of verisimilitude. Some of his characters were living persons: the prominent courtier George Ferrers, who was Master of the King's Pastimes during the 1552-53 Christmas season; Richard Sherry, who published two books in 1550; the Irish rebel Cahir Mac Art, who died in 1554; and Baldwin himself. Even the names “Streamer” and “Willot” appear obscurely in contemporary records. Furthermore, the action of Beware the Cat takes place at a definitely specified time in locations that are clearly described and recognizable.

The time of the action is, for Baldwin's readers, the immediate past. Streamer delivers his oration, “turning himself so in his bed as we might best hear him,” in Master Ferrers' lodging at court on the 28th of December 1552. Streamer mixed his potion “about solstitium estivale” (that is, June 11, Old Style). Mouse-slayer reports the main events of the last two years of her life, beginning with her residence at Stratford “in the time when preachers had leave to speak against the Mass, but it [the Mass] was not forbidden till half a year after” (that is, during the first half of 1549) and continuing until she clawed the gallant behind the arras “at Whitsuntide last,” two years later (which would be 17 May 1551). Therefore, Streamer mixed his potion and heard the cats speak at the end of spring in 1551, a year and a half before he reported his adventure to Baldwin and Ferrers. As a result, the main events of his narration clearly reflect the climate of opinion prevailing in England after June 1549 when the Latin Mass was abolished and the services in the new English Book of Common Prayer were made compulsory. A similar concern for chronology and accuracy of local detail is shown in the account of the death of Grimalkin.

The house where Streamer hears tales about Ireland, concocts his potion, and listens to the cats—the printing house above Aldersgate—is more specifically located than any place in earlier English literature. “More roomish within than garish without,” it is set accurately in London: in the city wall at the end of St. Martin's Lane, next to St. Anne's Church, where the bells of St. Botolph's Bishopsgate could be heard a mile away. Baldwin has clearly visualized his printing-house setting as an actual place, one that would have been immediately recognizable to his sixteenth-century London readers as the premises of the well-known Reformation printer John Day.

Streamer's chamber is also clearly delineated and precisely oriented: located at the end of the printing house, over the kitchen, with a “fair bay window opening into the garden, the earth whereof is almost as high as Saint Anne's Church top, which standeth thereby,” and through which the moon could be seen above the steeple of Mile End Church. The room has another trellis window which looks down upon the leads of Aldersgate, where “sometime quarters of men, which is a loathly and abhominable sight, do stand upon poles.” The room also has a fireplace large enough to stand in. Many of Baldwin's other descriptions are equally authentic. Thus the Irish kern Patrick Apore wore “a corslet of mail made like a shirt” and a helmet of “gilt leather … crested with otter skin”; to cook their meat, he and his boy, “after their country fashion … did cut a piece of the hide and pricked it upon four stakes which they set about the fire, and therein they sod a piece of the cow,” a description borne out by the woodcut portraying an Irish feast in John Derricke's Image of Ireland (1581), used on the jacket of this book.

Most of the earlier works of English fiction had been simple linear narratives told in the third person by two-dimensional narrators; the main emphasis was on situation and action, and the characters were only slightly developed. In contrast, Baldwin tells his story in the first person, though he speaks in his own person only at the beginning and end of the narrative. In the central portion, he reports what Master Streamer had told him about his own experiences; Streamer, while telling his own first-person story, narrates in turn stories told to him by four other people gathered at the house of John Day; and finally, Streamer repeats a cat's autobiographical narrative that he has overheard.

In addition to the complicated maneuvering of different points of view, in which the narrative is structured like inter-nesting boxes, Baldwin's characterization is quite extraordinary—especially that of Streamer, the principal narrator. Chaucer had said that

Whoso shall tell a tale after a man,
He mote rehearse as nigh as ever he can
Everich a word.

(Canterbury Tales, A, 731-733)

Similarly, Baldwin explains that he has “so nearly used both the order and words of him that spake them (which is not the least virtue of a reporter) that I doubt not but [the readers] … shall in the reading think they hear Master Streamer speak, and he himself in the like action shall doubt whether he speaketh or readeth.” As a result, Baldwin has Streamer characterize himself by the rhythm of his clauses and by his unique, pompous style. Streamer begins his oration with a Mistress Quickly-like performance of complete recall and free association, but in his attempt to impress his listeners he unconsciously reveals himself as a pedantic fool. He spews forth Latin quotations and esoteric bits of learning that are often ludicrously incorrect. He pretends to be adept in all sciences and solemnly asserts that the astronomers are wrong in supposing that the changes of the moon cause the variation of the tides; on the contrary, he claims that the tides cause the changes of the moon—his own Copernican hypothesis, though he had never heard of Copernicus. He is a coiner of bizarre terms, such as “like-nightical” for “equinoctial,” and he delights in a virtuoso parade of rhyming terms in enumerating the “barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, rumbling of rats,” etc. He praises his friend Thomas by saying that no others could have done so well, “except myself, and a few more of the best learned alive.”

In addition to allowing Streamer to reveal himself unwittingly in his speech, Baldwin also uses a device of characterization not available to presentday authors: this is the marginal note, by means of which he can, while maintaining his pose of impartial reporter, comment amusingly or satirically upon the action. For example, when Streamer reports that the moon “saw me neither in my bed nor at my book,” Baldwin writes acidly in the margin, “The man is studious.” When Streamer launches into rhymed prose on the “wawling of cats, rumbling of rats,” Baldwin observes in the margin, “Here the poetical fury came upon him.” And when Streamer speaks of himself “and a few more of the best learned alive,” Baldwin adds this marginal note: “The best learned are not the greatest boasters.”

Baldwin also uses marginalia to guide the responses of his readers by explaining significances they may have overlooked. Thus when Streamer, adopting an air of great learning, discourses on the astrological importance of planetary hours, but confuses them with solar hours, Baldwin notes in the margin, “Master Streamer varieth from the astronomers in his planetary hours.” Similarly, when the old bawd tells the merchant's wife that the weeping cat is her daughter, Baldwin adds, “A shameful lie shamefully set forth.” The author also frequently points up the satirical and theological application of references and episodes by marginal comment. In response to Streamer's use of the term “Popish conjurer,” for instance, Baldwin observes gravely, “Transubstantiationers destroy Christ's manhood.”

So, in Beware the Cat we have a fantastic fiction set realistically in the London of Baldwin's own time; a very original handling of point of view—a first-person narrative with authorial comment; an enveloping action; and satirical characterization, in which the narrator by his speech produces an effect quite the opposite of that which he intends. Baldwin also presents us with a novel of ideas—ideas of pressing contemporary importance reflecting the religious struggles of the Protestant Reformation. In Beware the Cat, the author is playing a very complex fictional game: he uses an illusion to destroy what he considers to be an illusion. The general thrust of his fictional argument is that only a person gullible enough to believe a character as outrageous as Gregory Streamer would believe in the “unwritten verities” handed down by the “traditions” of the Church. In literature, contrary to what one expects in other disciplines, more complex productions are sometimes created before more simple ones. This is certainly the case in the history of English prose fiction, for Baldwin's narrative techniques were more sophisticated than those of most writers of fiction before the nineteenth century.

After Beware the Cat, the next original work of English fiction is the pseudonymous Oliver Oldwanton's Image of Idleness (ca. 1555), a series of letters purportedly between Bawdin Bachelor and Walter Wedlock, which can be called the first English epistolary novel. This was followed in about 1567 by the jest-book biography Merry Tales by Master Skelton. Then came Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F. J. (1573). About 1576, Thomas Whythorne completed A Book of Songs and Sonnets with Discourses of the Child's, Young Man's and Entering Old Man's Life, which remained in manuscript until 1961, when it was edited by James M. Osborn as The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne. This is a first-person narrative which ostensibly recounts the events of the first forty-seven years of the author's life. The main function of the narrative, however, is to frame and provide occasion for 197 poems, which makes it a work similar in kind to Gascoigne's prose and verse Adventures of Master F. J. and his verse Dan Bartholomew of Bath; in fictional technique, the narrative is like Gabriel Harvey's A Noble Man's Suit to a Country Maid, which recounts the attempted seduction of the author's otherwise unknown sister, Mercy, in the later months of 1574.

In 1577 appeared John Grange's The Golden Aphrodite, a pedantically humorous mythological tale of courtship with more attention to style than to action. The following year John Lyly's amazingly popular Euphues the Anatomy of Wit was published, a collection of “euphuistic” speeches and letters strung upon the thinnest possible thread of narrative. In 1579, Stephen Gosson's Ephemerides of Phialo was printed, a fictional refutation of Lyly's Euphues (but unfortunately couched in a similar style).

In 1580, no fewer than seven original works of prose fiction were brought to completion: Nicholas Breton's Miseries of Mavillia (in his Will of Wit), the episodic autobiography of a female Lazarillo de Tormes; W.C.'s Adventures of Lady Egeria, a formless amalgam of perjury, murder, matricide, infanticide, adultery, and incestuous rape—every kind of horror and perversion that could be invented—set forth in a pretentiously inflated style; Robert Greene's Mamillia, a Looking Glass for the Ladies of England, an imitation of Lyly that marked Greene's debut as a prolific novelist; Lyly's Euphues and his England, a sequel to his earlier popular success; Anthony Munday's Zelauto the Fountain of Fame Erected in an Orchard of Amorous Adventures, another imitation of Euphues but with a stronger narrative line; Austin Saker's Narbonus the Labyrinth of Liberty, yet another Euphuistic imitation; and finally, and best of all, the first version of Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. This last work was begun in 1577 and completed in 1580, but remained in manuscript until 1926. It is a tragi-comedy, blending the chivalric and pastoral in a five-act dramatic structure. Four years later, Sidney undertook a radical revision and expansion of the work, which he then began in medias res, and rewrote the action in an enormously complex, interlaced fashion. He broke off in what was probably the middle of his revision, and this incomplete version was printed in 1590. It continued to be the most highly admired work of English fiction for more than a hundred years.

If we set aside Elyot's Image of Governance as being not even minimally narrative and Scoggin's Jests as lacking an adequate story line, then Beware the Cat remains as the first original English work of prose fiction of more than short-story length. It is also, in terms of artistry and interest, one of the very best productions of sixteenth-century European fiction and compares well with the much-admired Spanish La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes, with which it shares many characteristics and which was printed only a year after the composition of Baldwin's work. Beware the Cat cannot equal in artistic merit the unfortunately incomplete revised version of Sidney's Arcadia (1590), which is by any measure the best piece of sixteenth-century prose fiction produced in any language, but it does stand on a par with or ahead of other now highly regarded works of early English fiction by Nashe, Gascoigne, Lodge, and Deloney.

Notes

1. Most of the early jest books have been edited by W. C. Hazlitt, Shakespeare Jest-Books (3 vols., London, 1864), and Paul M. Zall, A Hundred Merry Tales and Other English Jest-books (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1963).

2. In 1912, Arundel Esdaile listed Beware the Cat in his standard bibliography, A List of English Tales and Prose Romances Printed Before 1740; and the following year, Friedrich Brie published a long article on it in Anglia (37:303-350), arguing that it was the “erste originelle prosdaerzählung” in English (but his article was not listed in the first Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature [1940] and so dropped from sight). In 1963, the late William P. Holden reprinted the text of the inferior 1584 edition, but in his introduction he discussed it only as satire and made no mention of it as original fiction.

3. In the prose introduction to the tragedy of Owen Glendower in the suppressed [1554] edition of A Mirror for Magistrates (ed. L. B. Campbell [Cambridge, 1938], opposite p. 8), Baldwin said that Owen Glendower was “a man of that country whence (as the Welshmen bear me in hand [i.e., inform me]) my pedigree is descended.” The Dictionary of National Biography account is inadequate; there are better biographies by W. F. Trench, Modern Quarterly of Language and Literature, 1 (1899): 259-267, and E. I. Feasey, Modern Language Review, 20 (1925): 407-418. Authorities for facts not mentioned by either Trench or Feasey are here noted.

4. C. W. Boase, Register of the University of Oxford, 1 (1885): 173.

5. Whitchurch printed three more editions in the early 1550s. About 1555, Richard Tottel issued a fifth edition “newelye sette foorthe and enlarged by Thomas Paulfreyman.” This omitted Baldwin's name from the title page, substituted a new dedication by Paulfreyman to Lord Henry Hastings, omitted most of Baldwin's first book, and slightly expanded and rearranged the remaining contents in seven books. About 1556, Baldwin reissued his original four-book version, “Newly perused and augmented by W. B. first author thereof,” in which he objected “to have any other man plowe with my oxen, or to alter or augmente my doynges.” Nevertheless, the following year Tottel reprinted Paulfreyman's seven-book version unchanged. In the last year of his life, Baldwin made a final attempt to regain some control over the work he had originally composed, apparently entering into an agreement with Tottel to issue another edition of his own work partly in its original form but also accepting some of the revisions introduced by Paulfreyman. This appeared posthumously in 1564—expanded to ten books. Notwithstanding, in 1567 Tottel issued what was in actuality a ninth edition of the Treatise in twelve books, “Fyrst gathered and set foorthe by Wylliam Baudwin, and nowe once againe augmented, and the third tyme enlarged by Thomas Paulfreyman.” This third revision by Paulfreyman was reprinted sixteen times between 1571 and 1651 without essential change. Baldwin finally did receive part credit on the title page as co-author; but his dedication and prologue were usurped by Paulfreyman's, and though much of the wording of the book remained his, its organization was greatly changed. Baldwin similarly suffered from later augmentations and revisions by others of his Mirror for Magistrates. His publishing career illustrates how difficult it was for a Tudor author to retain control of his own text.

6. This has not heretofore been attributed to Baldwin, but his authorship is established by the combination of his initials, “W. B., Londoner,” on the title page, and his personal motto “Love and Live” (which he appended to all of his works) in the preface.

7. Albert Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Revels at Court in the Time of King Edward VI and Queen Mary (Louvain, 1914), 89-125.

8. Henry R. Plomer, “An Inventory of Wynkyn de Worde's House ‘The Sun in Fleet Street’ in 1553,” The Library, 3rd series, 6 (1915): 228-229 and 234.

9. See Willard Farnham, The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley, 1936), chaps. 8-10.

10. Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England, ed. W. D. Hamilton, Camden Society, new series 11, Part 2 (1877): 114, Robert Crowley's continuation of Thomas Lanquet, An Epitome of Chronicles, 1559, 4F4.

11. Friedrich Brie, “William Baldwin als Dramatiker,” Anglia, 38 (1914): 157-172. Historians of the drama have mistakenly cited the title as “Love and Live,” which is not a title but Baldwin's motto.

12. James Gairdner, ed., “Historical Memoranda in the Handwriting of John Stowe, from Lambeth MS 306,” in Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles, Camden Society, new series 28 (1880): 126; and also Brit. Lib. MS Harley 367, f.3, printed by Charles L. Kingsford, A Survey of London by John Stow, 1 (Oxford, 1908): ix-x, xlviii-xlix.