SOURCE: Ringler, William A., Jr. “Beware the Cat and the Beginnings of English Fiction.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 12, no. 2 (winter 1979): 113-26.

[In the following essay, Ringler offers an account of Beware the Cat, places the novel in the larger context of the history of English prose fiction through 1558, and comments on the excellence of Baldwin's handling of point of view, action, characterization, and style.]

The English novel was born the evening of December 28th, 1552. This is a fact of literary history that does not appear in any history of the novel. It is a fictional date, but the fiction is enmeshed with verifiable fact. On that evening George Ferrers, Master of the King's Pastimes, William Baldwin, playwright and printer, Gregory Streamer, and Master Willot were together in Ferrers' chamber at the Court of the boy king Edward VI. The first two men were well known in their time, and the names of all four are found in contemporary records. According to Baldwin's report, they began a discussion on whether animals were capable of speech. Most of the company were sceptical; but Streamer offered to prove to them that animals could talk, by telling them about an experience he himself had had only a short time before. Streamer's narrative of his experience, as reported by Baldwin, is the first English novel, or if you prefer, the earliest original work of longer prose fiction in English. It may appear surprising, but it is nevertheless true, that before Baldwin's time all works of prose fiction in English of more than short-story length had been translations or adaptations, mainly from Latin or French, and not original.

Because I cannot assume that everyone has read the first English novel, Baldwin's Beware the Cat, as he titled his book, I'll give a brief account of it, with a few quotations as examples of its style. It was written during the first few months of 1553, but Queen Mary's accession to the throne in July made its publication impossible because of the anti-Roman Catholic satire that it contained. It was first printed in 1570, when two editions appeared, again in 1584, and again in 1652. There were probably other editions that were read out of existence, for the work was well known to the Elizabethans—Shakespeare and Nashe, among others, referred to and made use of it.

The story is a first-person narrative by Streamer, reported by Baldwin and divided into three sections. I quote part of Streamer's opening sentence, because he is characterized by his speech and the peculiar structure of his clauses:

Being lodged (as, I thank him, I have been often) at a friend's house of mine, which, more roomish within than garish without, standeth at Saint Martin's Lane end and hangeth partly upon the town wall that is called Aldersgate (either of one Aldrich, or else of elders, that is to say ancient men of the city which among them builded it—as bishops did Bishopsgate; or else of eldern trees, which perchance as they do in the gardens now thereabout, so while the common there was vacant grew abundantly in the same place where the gate was after builded, and called thereof Elderngate—as Moorgate took the name of the field without it, which hath been a very moor. …)

And so on for another page—a combination of ostentatious parade of mistaken learning, random association, and complete recall in the manner of Shakespeare's later Mistress Quickly. It is also precise, for any contemporary would recognize the house at Saint Martin's Lane end as the premises of the Reformation printer John Day. I continue quoting, but abbreviate:

While I lay at the foresaid house for the causes aforesaid, I was lodged in a chamber hard by the Printing House … [with] a side door and … steps which go up to the leads of the Gate, whereas sometime quarters of men … do stand up upon poles … [and where] every night many cats assembled, and there made such a noise that I could not sleep for them.

Next evening he told the company assembled in the printing house of being kept awake by the cats, whereupon various people told stories of cats and other animals. A man from Staffordshire told how he had heard that a man of his county, some forty years ago, walking through Kankwood, was called by name by a cat who said, “Tell [your kitten] that Grimalkin is dead.” When he got home he told his wife about his miraculous experience of hearing a cat talk, whereupon his kitten, who was standing by, said, “‘And is Grimalkin dead? Then farewell dame,’ and therewith went her way and was never seen after.” Incidentally this is where Shakespeare got the name Grimalkin.

After the man from Staffordshire had told his story, another member of the company remarked that it might very well be true, because in Ireland thirty-three years ago an Irish churl had told him (I again quote and abbreviate):

There was, not seven years past, a kern of John Butler's dwelling in the fassock of Bantry called Patrick Apore, who minding to make a prey in the night upon Cahir Mac Art, his master's enemy, got him with his boy (for so they call their horse-keepers be they never so old knaves) into his country, and in the night time entered into a town of two houses, and brake in and slew the people, and then took such cattle as they found, which was a cow and a sheep, and departed therewith homeward. But doubting they should be pursued … he got him into a church … [where] he thought it best to dine, for he had eaten little that day. Wherefore he made his boy go gather sticks, and strake fire with his feres, and made a fire in the church, and killed the sheep, and after the Irish fashion laid it thereupon and roasted it. But when it was ready, and that they thought to eat it, there came in a cat and sat her by him, and said in Irish, ‘Shane foel,’ which is, ‘give me some meat.’ He, amazed at this, gave her the quarter that was in his hand, which immediately she did eat up, and asked more, till she had consumed all the sheep.

Notice the shift in rhythm, a collection of short phrases suitable to a simple speaker, contrasted to the suspended periodic sentences used by Streamer. The story continues: after the cat had eaten the cow also, the two men fled from the church, and when they had gone a mile or two:

… the moon began to shine, and his boy espied the cat upon his master's horse, behind him, and told him. Whereupon the kern took his dart, and turning his face toward her, flang it and struck her through with it. But immediately there came to her such a sight of cats that, after long fight with them, his boy was killed and eaten up, and he himself … had much to do to scape.

When the kern reached home he told his wife what had happened, whereupon his cat said, “Hast thou killed Grimalkin!” and sprang at his throat and strangled him. And this, concluded the man from Ireland,

the churl told me now about thirty-three winters past; and it was done … not seven years before. Whereupon I gather that this Grimalkin was it which the cat in Kankwood sent news of unto the cat which we heard of even now.

There then follows a general discussion by members of the company concerning the creditability of these stories, some suggesting that Grimalkin was a witch rather than a cat. This provides occasion for stories about witches, who change the shapes of men and animals and produce werewolves in Ireland, the secret of doing so being handed down by word of mouth from mother to daughter. The upshot of all these stories is that Streamer, who had at first been sceptical, now believes that animals are capable of speech and that men can learn to understand them.

In the second section of his narrative Streamer tells how he found in Albertus Magnus a recipe for a concoction that would enable one to understand the voices of animals. He gives a long and hilarious account of mixing his loathesome potion—the juice of a kite's heart, “her upper beak and the middle claw of her left foot, the fat of the hare's kidneys and the juice of his right shoulder bone,” etc. He tells how he is careful to execute each step in distilling his potion at a time when an auspicious planet is reigning; but in his account of the planets it becomes perfectly clear that he does not understand astrology and does not know the difference between a planetary and a solar hour. All Streamer's planetary references are wrong; so Baldwin the author has him, by parading his pretended learning, reveal his ignorance.

Streamer goes on to tell how he applied the potion to his ears:

But, because as I perceived the cell perceptible of my brain intelligible was yet too gross, by means that the filmy pannicle coming from dura mater made too strait oppilations by ingrossing the pores and conduits imaginative, I devised to help that with this gargaristical fume, whose subtle ascension is wonderful.

So he makes a further potion, by means of which he is able to hear more noises than were heard in Chaucer's House of Fame.

In the third section of his narrative Streamer tells how, after moon-rise, the cats return to the leads on the roof, and how he, with the aid of his potions, is able to understand what they say. From the speech of the cats he learns that their assembly is actually a court before which one of their number, Mouse-slayer, is being tried for infraction of certain laws of cat-dom. To exonerate herself, Mouse-slayer tells the story of her life, and the remainder of Streamer's narrative is his report of the story she tells. On the preceding two evenings, she says, she had told the events of the first four years of her life, and on this the third and last evening she will tell what had befallen her during the past two years. Her story is a picaresque narrative about moving from family to family and observing the absurdities in the conduct of the human beings with whom she lives. Streamer says he reports the story she told verbatim, though his cat-talk does not differ from human-talk.

Mouse-slayer tells the court that at the beginning of her fifth year she left London for Stratford in the country, “and this was in the time when preachers had leave to speak against the Mass, but it was not forbidden till half a year after.” This is a convenient topical allusion which allows us to date the imagined time of this event as during the first half of 1549, for the act of Parliament that abolished the Latin Mass and established the English Communion Service was passed in January, but was not ordered into effect nationally until June of that year. Baldwin, with specific topical details, sets his story clearly in the England of his own time; a technique quite different from that of most of the earlier romancers who dealt only vaguely with the far away and long ago.

In the country the woman with whom Mouse-slayer lived thought she had gone blind, and superstitiously summoned a priest, who supposedly restored her sight by holding up before her a sacramental wafer. The other cat-members of the court are interested in this and suggest that they ought to arrange their deliveries in a place where Mass is being celebrated so that their kittens “might in their birth be delivered of their blindness.” Don't bother, said Mouse-slayer, I've tried it and it didn't work.

Her next adventure was with an old woman, something like the Spanish Celestina, who was very devout and would say her beads before a statue of Our Lady every day, but who kept a bawdy house and was a receiver of stolen goods. A young gentleman hired her to help him in gaining the affections and person of a citizen's wife who had refused his advances. The old bawd fed Mouse-slayer mustard, which made her eyes water, and then invited the wife to visit her. When the wife asked why the cat was weeping, the old bawd told her that it was her daughter, who had been turned into a cat for refusing the advances of a young man, and ever after wept at her misfortune. The wife was so impressed by this silly story that she immediately consented to an assignation with the young gentleman.

Next Mouse-slayer is mistaken for a devil because of her eyes shining in the dark, and an old priest who is summoned to exorcise the devil is made ridiculous when it is revealed that the apparition is only a cat. Finally Mouse-slayer gains revenge for the discomfort she suffered when she was fed the mustard, by revealing the young gentleman in compromising circumstances to the wife's husband. When Mouse-slayer finishes her story the assembled court decides that her life has been exemplary so far as cattish principles are concerned, and dismisses the charges against her.

And so, Streamer concludes, “this talk, lo, I heard between these cats,” which should convince you—Master Ferrers, Master Baldwin, and Master Willot—that animals have a language and can speak, and that human beings can understand them. Baldwin thereupon concludes his report of Streamer's narrative by observing that “these things will seem marvelous to many men. … And were it not for the approved authority of the ecstatical author of whom I heard it, I should myself be as doubtful as they.”

Beware the Cat is of course a satire, supporting the sweeping Reformation of religion under Edward VI, and attacking what the Protestants considered the superstitious accretions imposed by the Church of Rome upon primitive, and therefore supposedly pure, Christian observances; that is, articles of belief and rituals not found in the text of the Bible but handed down through the “traditions” of the Church as “unwritten verities”—the veneration of saints, the celibacy of the clergy, the conduct of church services in Latin instead of in the vernacular, even the celebration of the Mass itself, especially the attribution to it of any immediately practical efficacy. The number game played in the two accounts of the death of Grimalkin—the man meeting the cat in Staffordshire forty years ago and being told Grimalkin was dead, and the Irish churl's report thirty-three years ago of Patrick Apore's adventure seven years before in which he killed the fiend-like cat—suggest the fantastic grounds upon which oral reports come to be credited. This is made even more obvious in Thomas's 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 practical efficacy of the Mass is attacked in the account of the supposedly blind woman who thought herself cured by the sight of the sacramental wafer; and the adoration of images is mocked in the account of the old bawd who says her beads before a statue of the Virgin.

But though Beware the Cat is a satire, it is also a fictional narrative. In fact it is the earliest work of original prose fiction in English of more than short-story length—and so is the first English novel. It is therefore worthwhile to investigate the translations of prose fiction into English before Baldwin in order to determine what models he may have had. To the end of this essay I have appended a “Chronological List” of longer prose tales in English to 1558. The list is as complete as I can make it (more than a third of its items have never before appeared in the standard bibliographies of English fiction), yet it contains only forty-four titles.

When you examine the list the first thing you will notice is how late in date and how few in number the English prose narratives are. French prose versions of romances are numerous from the thirteenth century onwards; but in Old English we have only one item, a translation of the Latin Apollonius Tyrius, a Greek-romance type story which later became a source for the play of Pericles attributed to Shakespeare. Then there is an absolutely blank period of three-hundred and fifty years, until in the early fifteenth century we find eight prose narratives—three religious tales and five romances, including Malory's adaptation of French Arthurian stories.

The second thing you will notice is the lack of original works of English prose fiction. For more than a thousand years, from the coming of the Angles and Saxons until the middle of the sixteenth century, the only extant long works of English prose fiction are translations or adaptations from Latin and French, with a few from Dutch and German. Though the nature and extent of Malory's “originality” is furiously debated, it cannot be denied that the greater part of his Book of King Arthur and his Knights is straight translation, epitome, or adaptation of definitely identifiable French prose and English verse sources. Aside from Malory, the only clearly original narratives in English before Queen Elizabeth's reign are Elyot's Image of Governance, Borde's Scoggin's Jests, Baldwin's Beware the Cat, and Wedlock or Bachelor's Image of Idleness—only four out of forty-four items, and all of the mid-sixteenth century.

This is not to say that the art of narrative was uncultivated in pre-Elizabethan England, only that the medium in which it was presented was verse rather than prose. An investigation of the art of early English narrative would have to take into account Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Blind Harry's Wallace, Sir David Lindsay's Squire Meldrum, and dozens of other stories of high excellence that were told in verse. But the topic of this essay is prose narrative, the stories that led to the novel.

The shift from verse romance to prose fiction began in England with a shift from hearing to reading, and was immensely accelerated by the technological invention of printing. Gutenberg's printing press made it possible to distribute books more cheaply and in greater numbers than ever before. People interested in fiction gradually turned from hearing to reading, and just as gradually the vehicle for narratives changed from verse to prose. From 1050 to 1400 all longer fictional English narratives had been in verse; from the eighteenth century onwards ninety-five per cent or more of the fictional narratives have been in prose. Our own age is an age of prose; the Middle Ages were a period of verse; the Renaissance was in between, an age of both verse and prose.

William Caxton set up the first printing press in England in 1476. In order to provide copy for his presses, he himself translated, mainly from French, a considerable proportion of the books he published. More than a third of his English prose titles were longer works of prose fiction of his own translation. These were mainly chivalric romances, pseudo-histories or pseudo-biographies, and retellings of classical stories—the kinds of fiction popular at the Burgundian court where he had spent the years of his maturity. In addition to ten translations of his own, he also printed an earlier translation of Deguileville, and Malory's compilations. In less than two decades Caxton gave his countrymen more prose fiction in their own language than is extant from the preceding thousand years. But he was still only a translator of other men's works, not a creator of original works of his own.

From before Caxton only nine English prose tales, all translations, are extant. Caxton printed two of these, and printed ten others of his own translation. From Caxton's death in 1491 to the accession of Queen Elizabeth, twenty-one more translations were produced. Of the sum total of forty translations of fiction made from Old English times to 1558, twenty-eight are from French, eight from Latin, two from Dutch, and two from German. Two titles were translated twice—the Latin Apollonius and the French Ponthus. The largest proportion of the total, seventeen in all, were chivalric romances. There were also twelve narratives on classical subjects or with classical backgrounds, six on religious subjects, and five which can be called realistic. The interest in classical subjects is noteworthy, since Englishmen were apparently more attracted to the court of King Priam of Troy than to the court of King Arthur of Britain. Only the prose Merlin, which remained in manuscript, and Caxton's printing of Malory were devoted to Arthur, as opposed to the twelve other narratives set in classical Greece or Rome. Almost all the stories were about lands far away and times long ago. Only Merlin, Malory's Arthur, Borde's Scoggin, Baldwin's Beware the Cat, and Bachelor's Image of Idleness have their setting in England; only the last three deal with contemporary England, and only these three are original works rather than translations. The earliest English works of fiction were translations, and dealt with the antique and the exotic.

Most of these forty translated narratives have simple linear plots presented in chronological order. This is true even of the bulky Huon of Bordeaux, whose action extends through four generations, from the youth of Huon to the death of his great-grandson Croysant; or of the genealogical romance Melusine, in which the story of the serpent fairy Melusine and her sister Melior serves as a frame within which is narrated in turn the chief events in the lives of each of her ten sons. The best of this type is Paris and Vienne, translated by Caxton in 1485. It is a Romeo-and-Juliet type story of parental opposition with a happy ending. The plot-line is linear, begins at the beginning when the two first fall in love, and ends when all obstacles have been overcome and they marry. The story became extraordinarily popular, was translated from French into nine other languages, and Caxton's English went through four editions in twenty-five years.

Another plot structure was the interlaced narrative, earliest found in the Old English Apollonius and continuing through the revised version of Sidney's Arcadia in 1584 and beyond in the long seventeenth-century romances. Valentine and Orson, translated from a late fifteenth-century French original, is the most complicated example, for the interrelated actions of six main characters plus a large number of minor figures are narrated in more than forty interlaced episodes. The interlace technique is here used to provide variety, the unexpected, and the marvellous, rather than the working out of a causal sequence of related actions.

All but five of these forty translations are told in the third person by an uncharacterized narrator. Only rarely does the author comment on the action, as when the author of Charles the Great interjects, “O wicked Ganelon,” or when Malory comments that love in his day, “soon hot soon cold,” is different from what it had been in King Arthur's days, “for then was love truth and faithfulness.” The characters are sketched for the most part entirely from without; only seldom does the author give any hint of their feelings or of the workings of their minds.

Though most of the narratives are third person, the French Deguileville presents his personification allegories as dreams in which he observes himself; the Latin Esquillus presents his Death of Paul III as a personal letter; and the Spanish Diego de San Pedro presents both his novels in the first person, in which he as author is an observer but not a principal in the action. His Arnalte y Lucenda, 1491, translated in 1542 and dedicated to the poet Surrey, is especially interesting because of the unwitting self-revelation of the principal character. The unique copy of the only edition of this translation is in the British Library, Esdaile did not include it in his bibliography of English Tales and Romances, and the old Short Title Catalogue, not knowing its authorship, listed it under the blind heading “Amant.”

At Thebes in the time of Cadmus the author comes upon a gentleman, Arnalte, in a deserted place, who weeps continually and who tells him his story in order that his listener may understand “the ill that a woman hath caused me to suffer.” The author reports Arnalte's first-person narrative as follows (I give an extremely abbreviated summary):

“I fell in love with Lucenda, and told her that she would cause my death if she did not love me in return; but she would not reciprocate my affection. I told my friend Yerso of my love, and pined away in melancholy. I told my sister Belysa, who presented my suit to Lucenda (the speeches of Belysa and Lucenda are reported at length). Finally Lucenda, for Belysa's sake, agreed to meet me. I told her I had shown my constancy by my suffering, and that she was obligated to relieve me. She allowed me to kiss her hand, we parted, and my melancholy disappeared. Soon afterward I learned that Lucenda had married my friend Yerso. I challenged him, killed him in judicial combat, and wrote to Lucenda, ‘I have killed thine husband … sithen I have taken him away from thee, I will give myself to thee.’ When my sister delivered the letter, I was surprised to learn that Lucenda had entered a nunnery and would not hear my suit. So I have retired to this desert place, where I daily lament my misfortune, and tell my story so that you may know ‘what I have suffered by love.’” In this story Arnalte, while trying to invoke sympathy for wrongs supposedly done to him, reveals his egotism and his selfish inability to comprehend the feelings of others. San Pedro has been disparaged as a sentimental novelist; but I cannot believe that he was unaware of the ironic overtones of his first-person narration.

So far, all the works that have been mentioned were translations or adaptations. Originality and invention in longer English prose narratives are not found until the middle years of the sixteenth century. The earliest work that approaches being original fiction is Sir Thomas Elyot's Image of Governance, 1541, an account of the “acts and sentences notable” of the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus. Sir Thomas pretended that his work was history, a translation of an old Greek manuscript (like Geoffrey of Monmouth who pretended that he translated a British book given him by Walter of Oxford), but the contents were partly compiled and perhaps partly invented by Sir Thomas himself. Though his work is partly fictional, it contains hardly a trace of narrative; there is no account of the events or “acts” of Alexander's reign, only a collection of “sentences notable,” letters and speeches illustrating points of public policy. Sir Thomas's work is most closely allied to the Spanish Bishop Antonio de Guevara's Relox de príncipes, earlier translated into English by Lord Berners and later by Thomas North, works I have omitted from the “Chronological List” because I do not consider them narratives.

Another partly original work of fiction is Scoggin's Jests, of which the earliest extant edition is 1570, though it was written by Andrew Borde, who died in 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 which were drawn from identifiable sources, some probably from oral tradition, and some probably invented by Borde himself. The jest books, the earliest and best of which is A Hundred Merry Tales, 1525 (excellently edited, with others, by Paul Zall in 1963), were miscellaneous collections of humorous anecdotes. In Scoggin's Jests Borde attempted to give some semblance of unity to a collection of detached jokes by attaching them to an invented character, the Oxford scholar and wandering jester, Tom Scoggin, who later played pranks at the English Court. As an example I cite the anecdote, which still circulates as an ethnic joke, of how Scoggin had a simpleton as a pupil, and in order to get him a degree devised an examination that he thought his pupil could pass. He told him that Isaac had two sons, Esau and Jacob, and then asked him who was Jacob's father, to which the simpleton replied, he could not tell.

The detached anecdotes of the late medieval jest books, when collected under the name of a single character, such as Til Eulenspiegel, Virgil, or the Parson of Kalenberg, become the forerunners of the picaresque novel. Original English tales of this kind, however, did not appear until the 1580's in the anonymous Long Meg of Westminster and Thomas Deloney's later stories of artisans and merchants. Borde's Scoggin is not consistently drawn (he is sometimes a scheming confidence man, at other times he plays tricks for pure fun), and though he is made a participant in each anecdote, the incidents are not linked together and there is no clear sequence of action. His jests remain detached anecdotes rather than episodes in a longer story.

So we come to William Baldwin's Beware the Cat, written in the early months of 1553, as the first original work of prose fiction of more than short-story length in English, a work that has been strangely and unjustifiably neglected. Arundel Esdaile put it into his List of English Tales and Prose Romances in 1912 (pp. 17-18), the most important bibliography of the origins of the English novel; Friedrich Brie published a long article on it in Anglia in 1913, summarizing its plot and making the point that it was the “erste originelle prosaerzählung” in English, but his article was not listed in the first Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature and so dropped from sight. In 1963 the late W. P. Holden reprinted the 1584 edition, but in his introduction he discussed it only as a satire and made no claim for it as fiction (he did not mention and probably did not know Brie's article). In no history of the English novel, from Dunlop in 1814 to Davis in 1969, is Beware the Cat even mentioned. It is time to remedy this undeserved neglect, because it is not only the first original work of long prose fiction in English, it is also, in my opinion, of considerable artistic excellence and more interesting and entertaining than most of the English works that immediately followed it.

Since we have surveyed the course of English fiction to the mid-sixteenth century, we may ask what Baldwin learned from his predecessors, and we may answer, very little. Sir Thomas More, who prepared his readers for the marvels of his Utopia by his account of meeting the traveller 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 twenty-eighth of December. John Clerk's 1542 translation of Diego de San Pedro may have suggested the device of the first-person narrator who in attempting self-defense gives himself completely away. Caxton's translation of the Dutch Reynard the Fox is a satirical story of animals acting like people; but Baldwin's cats act like cats, cats possessing terrifying supernatural powers of evil. A few of Baldwin's humorous episodes are borrowed. His Irish werewolf story is from Giraldus Cambrensis's Topographia Hiberniae, his presciential pills from Tales and Quick Answers, and his old bawd and her weeping cat from Caxton's Aesop. But these are minor details. Baldwin invented the main elements of his story himself, invented a new way of telling his story, greatly advanced the art of characterization, and devised ways of making fiction a vehicle for important ideas.

Most of the earlier English works of fiction had been simple linear narratives told in the third person by characterless narrators, in which the main emphasis was on situation and action and the characters were only slightly developed. Baldwin tells his story in the first person, but speaks in his own person only at the beginning and end of the narrative. In the central portion he reports what Master Streamer had reported to him about his own experiences; and 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 he reports an autobiographical narrative, told by a cat, which he had 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 his characterization of Streamer, who is the principal narrator. Streamer characterizes himself by the rhythm of his clauses, by his style. He begins his story with a Quickly-like performance of complete recall and free association. In his attempt to impress his listeners he unconsciously reveals himself as a pompous fool. He throws out Latin quotations and pedantic bits of esoteric learning, which are often ludicrously wrong. He pretends to be an adept in all sciences, and solemnly asserts that the astronomers have been wrong in supposing that the changes of the moon cause the ebb and flow of the tides, because on the contrary it is the tides that cause the phases of the moon—his own Copernican hypothesis. He is a coiner of bizarre terms, such as “like-nightical” for “equinoctial,” and delights in a virtuoso parade of particularizing terms, as 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 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 present-day 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. Thus 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 rime 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 the best learned alive,” Baldwin observes in the margin, “The best learned are not the greatest boasters.”

So we have a quite original handling of point of view, a first-person narrative with authorial comment; an enveloping action; and characterization by speech style. And we also have a novel of ideas, ideas of great contemporary importance—transubstantiation, the celebration of the Mass, adoration of images, and other religious tenets called in question by the Protestant Reformation. Baldwin is playing a very complex fictional game, using illusion to destroy illusion. The general thrust of his fictional argument is that only a person who would believe Streamer would believe in the “unwritten verities” handed down by the “traditions” of the Church. It is a matter for some surprise that in literature, contrary to what one expects in other fields, more complex productions are sometimes created before more simple ones. In the field of English prose fiction this is certainly the case, for Baldwin's narrative techniques were more sophisticated than those of most writers of fiction before the nineteenth century.

In our literary histories George Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F. J., printed in 1573, has generally been considered the first English novel; but as we have seen, Baldwin's Beware the Cat has fully as much claim to be called a novel as Gascoigne's work, and precedes it in time by a full twenty years. After Baldwin's the next original work of English fiction is the pseudonymous Oliver Oldwanton's Image of Idleness, which was first printed about 1555 and went into a fourth edition by 1581. This is told entirely in the form of letters and so is the first English epistolary novel. Baldwin Bachelor writes to his friend Walter Wedlock describing his unsuccessful attempts at courtship and his opinions about matrimony and women. He had drawn up a list of eleven eligible maidens and widows, and so far has been refused by seven of them. The reason for his lack of success is evident from the boorish pomposity of the letters themselves. He writes to a friend that he has decided to marry in order to provide an example to husbands of how wives should be ruled, and asks him to present his suit to a recent widow; when the widow refuses him he sends her an epitaph for the tomb of her late husband; and so on through a series of comic misadventures in which he can never understand the reason for his failures. The device of unwitting self revelation is similar to that used by Baldwin in his portrayal of Master Streamer.

So Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F. J. is the third rather than the first English novel. After Gascoigne came John Grange's Golden Aphroditis in 1577. In that year Sidney began the composition of the first version of his Arcadia, which he completed in 1580 but did not publish, and which he revised in 1584 but did not finish. From then onward a flood of original fiction was let loose in England. But despite the hundreds of titles published from the 1570's to the early years of the eighteenth century, Baldwin's Beware the Cat remains artistically among the very best of its kind. Baldwin's work points forward to Gulliver's Travels with a side glance to Joseph Andrews. And so, though the English novel came of age in the eighteenth century, it was born in the sixteenth.

Chronological List of Long Fictional Prose Narratives in English to 1558

(1) Old and Middle English

Apollonius of Tyre. Apollonius thaes tiriscan. Anon. tr. into West Saxon, c.1050, of the Latin Apollonius Tyrius, between third and sixth century. Ed. 1834. See 1510 below.

Cologne. The Three Kings of Cologne. Anon. tr., c.1400, of John of Hildesheim's Latin Historia Trium Regum, c.1365. Ptd. 1496.

Deguileville. The Pilgrimage of the Soul. Anon. tr., 1413, of Guillaume de Deguileville's French verse Pèlerinage de l'Ame, 1335. Ptd. 1483.

Deguileville. The Pilgrimage of the Lyf of the Manhode. Anon. tr., c.1430, of the first version of Guillaume de Deguileville's French verse Pèlerinage de la Vie Humaine, 1330. Ed. 1869.

Alexander. The lyf of the gret Alexander. Anon. tr., c.1430, of Archpresbyter Leo's Latin Historia de Preliis, c.950. Ed. 1913.

Ponthus. King Ponthus. Anon. tr., c.1450, of the French Ponthus et la belle Sidoine, c.1390. Ed. 1897. See 1501 below.

Merlin. Merlin. Anon. tr., c.1450, of the French L'Estoire de Merlin, c.1250. Ed. 1865-99.

Ipomydon. Ipomedon. Anon. abbreviated tr., c.1460, of a French prose derivative of Hue de Rotelande's Anglo-Norman verse Ipomédon, c.1190. Ed. 1889.

Arthur. The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of his Knyghtes. Adaptation by Sir Thomas Malory, 1469, of the French Merlin, Arthur, Lancelot, Grail, and Tristan narratives, c.1230 etc. Ptd. 1485.

(2) Translations by William Caxton

Le Fèvre. The recuyell of the historyes of Troye. Tr., 1471-c.1474, of Raoul Le Fèvre's French Recueil des histoires de Troyes, 1464, and an anon. French prose version of Guido delle Colonne's Historia Trojana, mid-15th century. Ptd. c.1474.

Le Fèvre. Th[e] histories of Jason. Tr. of Raoul Le Fèvre's French Jason, Bruges 1475-76. Ptd. 1477.

Ovidius. Metamorphoseos. Tr., 1480, of a 15th-century French prose version of Ovide moralisée. Ed. 1819 (bks. 10-15 only), 1968 (complete).

Reynard the Fox. The historye of reynart the foxe. Tr., 1481, of the Dutch Hystorie van Reynaert die Vos, 1479. Ptd. c.1481.

Aesop. “The lyf of Esope” in The fables of Esope. Tr., 1483, from Julien Macho's French tr., 1480, of the Latin and German edition by Heinrich Steinhöwel c.1477. Ptd. 1484.

Charles I. Thystorye of Charles the grate Kyng of fraunce. Tr. 1485, of the French Fierabras ptd. 1483. Ptd. 1485.

Paris. Thystorye of Parys and of the fayr Vyenne. Tr. 1485, of the French Paris et Vienne, after 1432. Ptd. 1485.

Blanchardine. Blanchardine and Eglantine. Tr. 1489, of the French Blancandin et l'orgueilleuse d'amor, 15th century. Ptd. 1489.

Aymon. The four sons of Aymon. Tr., c.1489, of the French Quatre Filz Aymon ptd. 1480. Ptd. c.1489.

Virgilius. The boke of Eneydos. Tr. c.1490, of the French Livre des Eneydes, 1483. Ptd. c.1490.

(3) After Caxton

Rome. Thystorye of the vii Wyese Maysters of rome. Anon. tr., c.1493, of the Latin Historia Septem Sapientum Romae, early 14th century. Ptd. c.1493.

Kings. The Three Kings' Sons. Anon. tr., c.1500, of a French version probably by David Aubert, 1463. Ed. 1895.

Jean d'Arras. Melusine. Anon. tr., c.1500, of Jean d'Arras's French Melusine, c.1387. Ptd. c.1510.

Robert the Devil. The lyfe of Robert the Deuyll. Anon. tr., c.1500, of the French La vie Robert le Diable, late 12th century. Ptd. c.1500.

Ponthus. The noble historye of kynge Ponthus. Tr. by Henry Watson, c.1501, of the French Ponthus et la belle Sidoine, c.1390. Ptd. c.1501. See 1450 above.

Valentine. The Hystory of Valentyne and Orson. Tr. by Henry Watson, c.1502, of the French Valentin et Orson ptd. 1489. Ptd. c.1502.

Jerusalem. The dystruccyon of Jherusalem by Vaspazyan and Tytus. Anon. tr. of the French La destruction de Jherusalem et la mort de Pilate. Ptd. c.1508.

Apollonius of Tyre. Kynge Appolyn of Thyre. Tr. by R. Copland, 1510, of the French Apollin roy de Thire ptd. c.1482. Ptd. 1510. See 1050 above.

Eulenspiegel. A merye jest of a man that was called Howleglas. Anon. abbreviated tr., c.1510, of the German Till Eulenspiegel ptd. 1483. Ptd. c.1510.

Elias. Helyas Knight of the Swan. Tr. by R. Copland, 1512, of the French La généalogie avecque les gestes du Godeffroy de Boulion et de ses frères Baudoin et Eustace yssus du chevalier au Cyne ptd. 1504. Ptd. 1512.

Oliver. The hystorye of Olyver of Castylle and of the fayre Helayne. Tr. by H. Watson, 1518, of the French Olivier de Castille et Artus Dalgarbe ptd. 1482. Ptd. 1518.

Virgilius. The lyfe of Virgilius. Anon. tr., c.1518, of the Dutch Virgilius ptd. c.1512. Ptd. c.1518.

Kalenberg. The Parson of Kalenborowe. Anon. tr. and adaptation of the German verse Des pfaffen geschicht und Histori vom Kalenberg ptd. c.1473. Ptd. c.1520.

William of Palerne. Kyng Wyllyam of Palerne. Anon. tr., c.1520, of the Old French metrical Guillaume de Palerne c.1195. Ptd. c.1520-29.

Arthur of Little Britain. The hystory of Arthur of lytell brytayne. Tr. by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, before 1523, of the French Le livre du chevalier Artus fils du duc de Bretagne ptd. 1493. Ptd. c.1555.

Huon of Bordeaux. The historie of Huon of Bourdeaux. Tr. by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, c.1530, of the French Les prouesses et faitz merveilleux du noble Huon de bordeaulx ptd. 1513. Ptd. 1601 (lost edn. c.1534).

San Pedro. The castell of love. Tr. by John Bourchier, Lord Berners, before 1533, of the 1526 French tr. of the 1514 Italian tr. of Diego Hernandez de San Pedro's Spanish Cárcel de Amor, 1492. Ptd. c.1549.

*Elyot, Sir Thomas. The image of Governance Compiled of the Actes of Alexander Severus. Compiled 1540 by Sir Thomas Elyot from the Scriptores Historiae Augustae and other sources. Ptd. 1541.

San Pedro. A treatye entytled Lamant mal traicte de samye. Tr. by John Clerc, 1542, of Nicholas de Herberay's 1539 French tr. of Diego Hernandez de San Pedro's Spanish Arnalte y Lucenda, 1491. Ptd. 1542.

*Borde, Andrew. The First and best Part of Scoggins Jests Gathered by Andrew Boord. Composed before 1549. Ptd. c.1570 (probably earlier lost editions).

Pius II. The history of the Ladye Lucres and of her lover Eurialus. Anon. tr. of Enea Silvio Piccolomini's (later Pope Pius II) Latin De Duobus Amantibus Eurialo et Lucresia, 1444. Ptd. c.1550.

Esquillus. Wonderfull newes of the death of Paule the iii last byshop of Rome. Tr. by W[illiam] B[aldwin], c.1552, of the Latin Epistola de Morte Pauli Tertii, purportedly written in 1549 by Petrus Aesquillus. Ptd. c.1552.

*Baldwin, William. Beware the Cat. Composed 1553. Ptd. 1570.

Dares Phrygius. The true storye of the destruction of Troye. Tr. by Thomas Paynell, 1553, from Mathurin Heret's 1553 French version of Dares Phrygius's Latin De Excidio Trojae Historia, sixth century. Ptd. 1553.

*Wedlocke, Walter [should be Bachelor, Bawdin or Oldwanton, Oliver]. A lyttle treatyse called the Image of Idlenesse, conteynynge certeyne matters moved betwene Walter Wedlocke and Bawdin Bacheler. Composed c.1555. Purportedly “translated out of the Troyane or Cornyshe tounge by Olyver Oldwanton.” Ptd. c.1555.