WILLIAM Baldwin was the author of a number of important works of mid-Tudor literature and as editor of the Mirror for Magistrates (1563) has long had an important place in accounts of the development of English Renaissance literature. During his lifetime he was probably best known as the writer of the Treatise of Moral Philosophy (1547), which went through numerous editions, and as translator of the ribaldry anti-papal work the Wonderful News of the Death of Paul III (1552). Baldwin probably died sometime during the autumn of 1563. Although Baldwin’s place in literary history is assured due to his role in producing the Mirror for Magistrates he is a slightly ambiguous figure. His major works, the Treatise of Moral Philosophy and the Mirror, are not original compositions, but are rather patchwork texts made up of contributions from other writers as well as Baldwin himself. It is perhaps typical of Baldwin that one text that he probably wrote, A lyttel treatyse called the Image of Idlenesse, conteynyne certeyne matters moved betwene Walter Wedlock and Bawdin Bachelor. Translated out of the Troyane of Cornyshe tounge into Englyshe, by Olyver Oldwanton, and dedicated to the Lady Lust (1555), cannot be attributed to him with certainty.1 This is particularly unfortunate since A lyttel treatyse is the first epistolary novel written in English. Beware the Cat is the one major prose work over which there is no doubt concerning Baldwin’s authorship.
Beware the Cat is strange. It is hard to classify. Is it a history, which is what it claims to be, an interlude, a beast fable, a travelogue, or a parodic humanist treatise? In practice it is all of these and none. Its title page entices the reader by offering ‘diverse wounderfull and incredible matters/Very pleasant and mery to read’. Beware the Cat is undoubtedly full of diverse and strange matter. And at times it is pleasant to read, although some of the wonderful stuff it contains is also disgusting and occasionally disturbing. The slipperiness of Beware the Cat in a strange way reflects the ambiguous nature of Baldwin’s status as a Tudor writer. Beware the Cat is an exercise in foolish writing and Baldwin was a fool to write a work that consistently frustrates any and all attempts to fix its meaning. The folly of writing such a slippery feline work is, however, perhaps only exceeded by the foolishness of those who seek to collar Beware the Cat, to hang a generic bell onto Baldwin’s work in order to warn readers of its approach.
Beware the Cat opens with a dedicatory Epistle and then an Argument. It concludes with an Exhortation. The bulk of the text is made up of the three Orations of Master Streamer, the work’s deeply unreliable narrator, during which Streamer seeks to prove that cats can talk and reason as well as humans. The first Oration comprises a series of stories and tales about cats. The second Oration takes a rather different turn since it is mainly concerned with Streamer’s preparation of a potion that he hopes will allow him to understanding the language of cats. The third Oration is largely spoken by a female cat, Mouse-slayer, who is heard recounting her life as part of her defence in a feline court of law. All three Orations are presented through Streamer, although often, particularly in the final Oration, other transgressive voices break through—cats, servants, women, and Irish. Beware the Cat deliberately evokes Thomas More’s Utopia both in the way it is presented and in terms of form. It is a dialogue, largely spoken by one person. It was published with a range of textual apparatus which, on the surface, appear designed to elucidate the work’s meaning, but in practice simply complicate it further. Streamer is a parodic Hythloday. He is a speaker of nonsense whose authority is based on his ability to travel to strange lands and exotic locales and to report back what he has heard. It is also possible that the name Streamer is intended to mock More—since Streamer is a narrator who streams on and on, creating more and more text.
Beware the Cat was first published in 1570, although it was almost certainly composed in 1553. It may have been produced in 1570 as part of the propaganda campaign occasioned by the Northern Rebellion. It is possible that in 1570 those responsible for publishing Beware the Cat assumed its readers would understand Baldwin’s cats as representing Catholics in their superstition and bawdiness. This would, however, be a simplistic overtly confessional reading of the text. The concluding Exhortation comments that,
And that we may take profit by this declaration of Master Streamer, let us so live, both openly and privily that neither our own cat, admitted to all secrets, be able to declare aught of us to the world save what is laudable and honest; nor the Devil’s cat, which will we or nill we seeth and writeth all out ill doings, have ought to lay against us afore the face of God, who not only with shame but with everlasting torment will punish sin and wickedness.2
If we all have our own cats then clearly to read Baldwin’s cats as Catholics is at best reductive and at worst simply wrong. The Exhortation concludes the text by raising more interpretative questions than it solves. What is the difference between ‘our cats’ and the ‘Devil’s cat’? Our cats sound like some kind of external conscience, but if this is the case, why does the Devil have one? The cats also seem to have a role in God’s punishment of sin. The potential confusion engendered by the Exhortation is, however, entirely appropriate of a work that Baldwin explicitly locates in the fringes of authoritative or establishment culture.
The Argument places the genesis of Beware the Cat in a discussion between what appears to be a rather strange collection of men sharing a bedroom while working on the English court’s Christmas entertainments. The Argument opens by the narrator, not Streamer, commenting that: ‘It chanced that at Christmas last I was at Court with Master Ferrers, then master of the King’s Majesty’s pastimes, about setting forth certain interludes, which for the King’s recreation we had devised and were in learning.’3 Sharing the room with Ferrers and Baldwin, the narrator of this section of the work, were the former’s Astronomer, Master Wilmot, and his Divine, Master Streamer. It would be inappropriate to treat Baldwin’s account of the genesis of his work with anything but scepticism, particularly given that one of the text’s objects of scorn is people who are too trusting readers. There is, however, a reference in the accounts of the Master of the Revels to a payment being made to a William Baldwin, who appears to have been working as a prop-maker producing a crown of gold paper and buckram for an Irish prince.4 The Epistle that precedes the Argument provides further details concerning the work’s production.5 In the process, however, it stresses its distance from Streamer’s original words and at the same time, in a self-contradictory move, suggests that when Ferrers and Willot read Beware the Cat they will ‘think they hear Master Streamer speak’.6 Beware the Cat is self-consciously aware of itself as a printed work. This is reflected by the effort that Baldwin makes to stress the oral nature of Streamer’s three orations, while at the same time creating a text whose complexity and intertextuality mean that it would be impossible for anyone to actually recount all of the work’s matter. Streamer, like Hythloday, is a textual orator—a voluminous, complex speaker who can only exist in print, on a printed page. Having worked through the Epistle and the Argument, the reader finally reaches Streamer’s first Oration, where things are not simple.
Streamer opens his first Oration by telling his listeners, in a throw-away comment, that he was lodged at a friend’s house that ‘hangeth partly upon the town wall that is called Aldersgate’.7 Streamer’s words strongly suggest that he is in the house of the noted Protestant printer, John Day. At this point, however, Streamer’s narrative takes a wrong turn and becomes an extended digression on how the gates of London got their names. Streamer discusses Aldersgate, Moorgate, Newgate, and Ludgate. He comments that, ‘… Moorgate took the name of the field without it, which hath been a very moor; or else because it is the most ancient gate of the City, was therof in respect of the other, as Newgate, called the Eldergate’.8 This comment is accompanied by a gloss in the margin ‘Why Moorgate’. This is, however, at best misleading and at worst nonsense. Beware the Cat is not the kind of text that requires glosses—although at times it does seek to pass as a source of wisdom and knowledge. Streamer is clearly simply speculating at this point, despite his attempt to buttress his words with historical references. The use Streamer makes of linguistic analysis to explain place names mimics humanist hermeneutics and may be designed to specifically parody the historical work of humanists like John Leland. The opening of Beware the Cat mocks the Edwardian vogue for learned and speculative ‘commonwealth’ works reflected most clearly in the publication in 1551 of the first translation in English of Thomas More’s Utopia, whose translator and editor, Ralph Robinson, seems not to have realized that More wrote this work with his tongue firmly in his cheek.9
Streamer continues his account by telling the reader that while he was sitting by the fire in the print shop he got into a conversation with some of the people working in the printing house concerning the ‘wawling’ of the cats during the night. He then goes on to report the words of one of the servants, who tells the strange tail of a cat in Staffordshire. This is followed by another catty tale in which a cat speaks Irish. Streamer’s first narration is very quickly hijacked by other voices, those of the servants working in the printing house and then the cats who speak in the servants’ stories. Terence N. Bowers has suggested that ‘Streamer’s narrative … is composed of many orally transmitted tales which tend to multiply uncontrollably.’10 The first servant’s story concerns a Staffordshire man who was hailed by a cat as he rode home through Kankwood. Failing to respond when the cat calls his name, he is asked by his feline accoster to ‘Commend me unto Tittan Tatton and to Puss thy Catton, and tell her that Grimalkin is dead.’11 The Staffordshire man returns home and tells his wife and the rest of the household the story in the presence of his cat: ‘And when he had told them all the cat’s message, his cat, which had harkened unto the tale, looked upon him sadly, and at the last said, “And is Grimalkin dead? Then farewell dame,” and therewith went her way and was never seen after.’12 This brief story is then followed by a much longer one, told by a different man, which is set in Ireland and recounts the death of Grimalkin, who is killed by an Irish kern. This story is far more disturbing than the earlier one. It opens with two kerns stealing some cattle and deciding to hide in a church. While waiting to make their escape the two men cock a sheep. It is at this point that Grimalkin enters and demands to be fed. The cat then proceeds to eat an entire sheep and an entire cow. The men then decide to flee and in the ensuing chase kill Grimalkin. Although one of the kerns is killed during the fight, the other makes it home and tells his household what had happened:
When he was come home and had put off his harness … all weary and hungry he set him down by his wife and told her his adventure, which, when a kitling which his wife kept, scarce half a year old, had heard, up she started and said, ‘Hast thou killed Grimalkin!’ And therewith she plunged in his face, and with her teeth took him by the throat, and ere that she could be plucked away, she had strangled him.13
The story of the death of Grimalkin provokes a number of discussions, including on whether or not a cat could eat a sheep and cow at one sitting and on how cats can communicate in secret over long distances. The story of Grimalkin is typical of the oral tales that make up Beware the Cat. It is told at fourth hand—the original kern, who has been slain by the kitling, told his wife who told another man who told the servant who told the story to Streamer who tells it to the reader. What is important in this chain is its combination of implausibility and realism. It is inherently unlikely that such a chain of storytelling could produce a true or authoritative story and yet Streamer goes out of his way to provide realistic detail concerning when and where most of the links in the chain of storytelling took place.
Having heard the story of Grimalkin, Streamer and his comrades discuss its truthfulness. For example, when one of the men involved in the debate questions how Grimalkin could have eaten so much at one sitting, one of the other men replies that the Pope, ‘all things considered, devoureth more at every meal than did Grimalkin at her last supper’.14 Streamer, however, disputes this point arguing that, ‘although the Pope, by exactions and other baggagical trumpery, have spoiled all people of mighty spoils, ye (as touching his own person) he eateth and weareth as little as any other man …’.15 This exchange reflects the dangerous nature of the dialogue that Streamer reports as part of his first Oration. The reference to Grimalkin’s ‘last supper’ is clearly potentially blasphemous. At the same time, the use of the example of the Pope to defend Grimalkin’s monstrous appetite suggests an inability or a refusal by some of the men in the dialogue to differentiate between different kinds of rhetorical tropes. Streamer is right to suggest that as a man the Pope eats as much or as little as anyone else; however, the Pope as a polemical figure in much of the Protestant propaganda produced during the reign of Edward VI was as monstrous and rapacious as nay mythical giant cat.
The first Oration sets up a pattern that recurs throughout Beware the Cat in which the reader is seduced or tricked into believing that they are listening to an authoritative or at least a learned discussion before finding that they are actually reading something very different. As the discussion of Grimalkin continues, a ‘well-learned man and one of excellent judgement’ comments that ‘it doth appear that there is in cats, as in other kinds of beasts, a certain reason and language whereby they understand one another. But, as touching this, Grimalkin I take rather to be an hagat or a witch than a cat.’16 This does appear to be a relatively sensible comment; however, it then transpires that this well-learned man is called Thomas and had later died of a disease he caught in Newgate prison, ‘where he lay long for a suspicion of magic because he had desired a prisoner to promise him his soul after he was hanged’.17 Thomas is no more reliable as a source of information on cats and witches than Streamer. Or Streamer’s naïveté and gullibility is so complete that he does not realize that the reason Thomas is so knowledgeable is that Thomas is himself a witch. Certainly the request of a man’s soul does not seem compatible with excellent judgement.
All three Orations contain different voices and discourses. The first is particularly plural in turns of narrative voice. Its one point of relative stability is provided by the fact that they are all being reported by Streamer; however, the reader is constantly reminded by Baldwin that Streamer is a far from trustworthy narrator. Beware the Cat could have as its subtitle ‘beware the narrator’, particularly one who claims learning, wit, and authority. Streamer, like Hythloday, presents himself to the reader, as does Baldwin’s prefatory material, as a humanist, a man of letters and learning. By the end of the first Oration he is, however, in the world of Grimalkin, Thomas and Robin Goodfellow. In Beware the Cat Baldwin creates an object lesson of the dangers of print, and of print shops, for the learned. In the course of our conversation or a few printed pages one can go from what appears to be an authoritative humanist account of the names of London’s gates to a world of cats and witches. And this can happen without the narrator, and therefore if they are not very careful the reader, noticing what has happened.
Streamer’s status as an unreliable narrator means that the reader is invited, perhaps even incited, to pay close attention to Beware the Cat’s generic status. Baldwin’s work is at one level an animal fable which might lead the reader to expect it to have a few relatively straightforward possible meanings; however, as soon as one starts to read Baldwin’s work in terms of generic expectations problems arise. To start with, there are a number of possible candidates for the cats. Perhaps the most obvious one is Catholics. R. W. Maslen points out that Baldwin’s ‘… cats exhibit a number of characteristics which Protestant propagandists attributed to the Catholic clergy: they are sexually promiscuous, inordinately greedy … and given to meddling with magic’.18 However, as I have already suggested, identifying the cats as Catholics is problematic. This is partly because Baldwin’s cats look more like papists then Catholics. Baldwin’s cats have the ability to cross all boundaries and penetrate the secret recesses of the human world. They seem naturally to inhabit the periphery and the hidden. Maslen comments that ‘cat culture occupies the spaces left vacant by human society’.19 This is, however, only partly the case. Cats are at the bottom of a chain of knowledge or wisdom which leads through servants via printing and Streamer into the public sphere. There is a sense in which what Beware the Cat most consistently demonstrates is the extent to which printed knowledge, indeed by implication all knowledge, has its basis in half-truths and matted catty tales.
Beware the Cat’s interest in the relationship between fact and fiction, and wisdom and folly, is focused in Streamer’s second Oration upon medicine. This section of Baldwin’s work contains a detailed description of the potion that Streamer brews in order to allow him to understand the language of cats. In the process, however, Baldwin reflects on the role of Tudor doctors as potent, potentially rich, tale tellers.
Tudor doctors were constantly in situations that completely outstripped their knowledge. This created a situation in which the role of the doctor became, as much as anything, about finding ways of managing and containing the fear caused by injury or disease. Andrew Wear comments that ‘The physician’s ability to see into the diseased body and to tell its story created a sense of rationality, of being able to answer the question “why?”, which was the hallmark of rational, learned physic.’20 Being able to narrate a disease, to create a narrative from a patient’s symptoms, was an essential skill for a Tudor doctor. And in order to create narrative a doctor needed to be able to name and know the disease that he or she was treating. This emphasis on having to create a logical narrative, to tell a believable story, presented serious problems when the disease could not be fully defined or known, for example, with a new disease like syphilis, which did not appear in classical medicine books. The need to tell a story in order to make a disease understandable had the effect of creating a strange and potentially disturbing link between stories and diseases. Both had beginnings, middles, and ends—finding or discovering the true beginning might help one to fully understand and even predict how the disease/story would end. Wear points out further that ‘physicians were concerned with credibility, and in the early modern period stories were still appropriate for conveying the truth, even if the truth was not fully visible. Narrative description could create matters of fact as if they had been seen.’21 The problem was that creating stories was also what characters like Streamer did. Indeed the Dedication to Beware the Cat refers to a work entitled Cure of the Great Plague that Streamer is apparently translating out of Arabic. Tudor doctors needed to create narratives in the same way that writers did and this placed their work dangerously close to the emerging form of prose fiction. It is therefore perhaps not surprising to find doctors appearing as characters in some of the earliest printed prose works.
Early modern authors were aware of the medicinal relationship between healing and narrating. Jest books contain numerous stories of trickster doctors. The Merry jest of a man called Howleglas (1530) is a collection of stories in which the eponymous ‘hero’ tricks various people by relying on their greed, stupidity, and general lack of wit. It is a populist version of Erasmus’s far more famous Praise of Folly. In one of the stories Howleglas makes a very tempting offer to a ‘master’ of a hospital—for a small fee he will cure everyone in the hospital. The master leaps at this chance to save money and accepts Howleglas’s offer:
Upon the morrow after came Howlegals to [the] hospital with two men after him [and] than he asked the sicke folke, one after the other, what disease they had, and whan he had asked them all, than he made the[m] swere upon a booke/[that] they shold kepe his counsaile what so euer he sayd to the[m]. They answered that they wold. Than sayde Howleglas to them, I haue undertaken[n] to make you all hole, which is unpossible, but I must nedes [burn] one of you all to pouder. And then must I take the pouder of him [and] giue al to the other to drinke therof [with] other medicines [that] I shall minister thereto. And he [that] is the last, wha[n] I shall cal you out of the hospital [and] he that cannot go: shalbe [burned].
Than prepared euer one of [the] sicke folke there crutches [and] gere [that] they wold not be the last. And wha[n] Howleglas was co[m]e to the maisters of [the] hospital: tha[n] called he the[m] [and] tha[n] thei ran out of the hospitall [and] som of them had not ben out of there in x yere before. Than wha[n] the sicke folk wer out of the hospital: than asked he [Howleglas] hys money [and] tha[n] tha master gaue it him [and] than he departed.22
Howleglas is a parodic doctor, but a very successful one. He clears the hospital and ‘cures’ all the patients. Indeed, Howleglas makes the cripples walk. One could argue that Howleglas’s cure is nothing more than a trick, but in a world in which people were ignorant of the real causes of most diseases there was always the danger that all cures, all medicine, would appear to be nothing more than a jest—and that all doctors were tricksters and conmen.
Tales and quicke answeres, very mery and pleasant to rede (1532) is a collection of jests. It contains numerous stories in which doctors are either the protagonist or the object of ridicule. For example:
There was a certayn riche man on a tyme, which felle sycke: to the whose curyng came many phisitians (for flyes by heapes will flee to honye). Amonge them all there was one that sayde: that he muste nedes take a glister, if he wolde be holle. Wha[n] the sicke man … harde hym saye so, he sayde in a great furye: Out of doors with those phistians they be madde: For whereas may payne is in my head, they wolde heale me in myne arse.
This fable sheweth that holsom thynges to the[m] that lacke knowledge and experience, seme hurtfull.23
Another jest depicts a surgeon in an even more disreputable light:
There was an olde woman the which bargained with a surgean to heal her sore eyes: and whanne he hadde made her eies hole, and that she sawe better she couenaunted that he shulde be payde his moneye, and not before. So he a layde a medycyence to her eyes, that shulde not be taken awaye the space of v dayes. In whiche tyme she might not loke uppe. Euery daye, whan he came to dresse her, he bare awaye somewhat of her householde stouffe, table clothes, candlesticks, and dishes. He lefte no thinge, that he coulde carye clene. So whan her eies were hole, she looked up, and saw that her householde stouffe was caryede awaye, she sayde to the surgean, that came and required his money for his labour: Syr my promise was to pay you, whan ye made me se better than I did before: That is trouth, quod he. Mary, quod she, but I see worse nowe than I did. Before ye layde medicines to myn eies, I saw moche fayre stouffe in myn house, and now I see nothinge at all.24
In this story the surgeon is little more than a thief. The form of Tales and quick answers precludes lengthy depictions of doctors narrating diseases. Instead, what the reader is presented with are numerous stories in which doctors and other medical man are represented as being little more than con artists.
Fictions and fictionality hovered around medicine in Tudor England. At the same time, medical books were an important segment of the early English printed book trade. There was, not surprisingly, a large market for self-help books for doctors and works purporting to offer cures, potions, and charms to all manner of ailments. Andrew Borde’s The Breuiary of Helthe (1547) presents itself as a guide for doctors and learned non-medical readers. It makes the bold claim that ‘there is no sickness in man or woman the which may be from the crowne of the heede to the sole of the foote but you shal fynde it in this boke’.25 At the same time, Borde is keen to warn his readers that:
every man [and] woman of what degre or estate so euer they be lackynge the speculation of phisiche to beware to minister medicines, although they take nothynge for theyr labour, nor for the medicines, for yf they haue not a doctours learninge, and also knowynge theyr symples howe they shall compounde them, and what operation they be of, and how and whan [and] what tyme they shodle be ministered, such ignorant persons may do great harme.26
The Breuiary is rather incoherent in terms of its status as an advice book since this warning would seem to pertain only to those who have not read it. Anyone who reads the entire Breuiary would clearly be learned in Tudor medicine.
The Antidotarius, published in 1530 by Robert Wyer, focuses specifically on plasters, ointments, oils, and ‘wound drinks’. It is difficult to know what to make of the very complex recipes for medicines that this work contains. The following is The Antidotarius’s recipe ‘To make a good Jews plaster to fresh wounds’:
Take white wax iii ounces, white rosin, Turpentine of each ii ounces, oil of roses, white frankincense of each ii ounces, fresh juices of Roses iii ounces, red wine one measure, and of all these herbs take that ye may get, winter green, syndowe, diapensia, matrisilra, herba serasenica, herba tunici, fumus letre, plantaye great and small, storks bill, herba ruba, of each a like amount till ye have enough, and good wine, strain the herbs and thresh there out the sap and put the wine on the herbs that they may become moist with wine … Then strain it through a cloth, than do the sap and the wine in a kettle [and] therein do the wax, Turpentine, Rosin and oil … than strain it through a cloth and … let it set all together v or vi hours long … and the next day melt it again; and do therein the Maltyke Frankincense and Myre made all in a powder and do it in the kettle and let it set together … and then take it from the fire and let it be cold and ye haue a right Jews plaster that healeth wounds.27
What is being described here is a distilling and combining process. Its complexity suggests a desire to make the knowledge contained in The Antidotarius radically different to that of popular medicine. The credibility desired by Tudor doctors when they created disease narratives is being transferred in this passage to the process of medicine making.
There is clearly a difference between works like The Antidotarius and The Book of secrets of Albertus Magnus (1525), which informed its readers that
The virtue of the hare is showed to be miraculous for the fete if it be joined with a stone or with the head of a black owl, it moveth a man to hardiness, so that he fear not death.
And if it be bounden to his left arm, he may go whether he will and he shall return safe without peril.28
This appears to be simple folklore, as does The Book of secrets’ ‘cure’ for a wife’s lack of sexual desire: ‘When a woman desireth not her husband, then let her husband take a little of the tallow of a buck Goat and let him anoint her privy member with it, and do the act of generation she shall love him and shall not do the act of generation afterward with any [other].’29 It is interesting to note that this advice might even have worked: using lubrication might make a woman ‘desire’ or at least tolerate her husband more; however, the reason for this cure’s efficacy would not be the Tudor one, which is that goats, and male goats in particular, are notoriously lusty and therefore the application of goat grease to a woman’s ‘privy member’ would make her more lustful.
The Second Part of Streamer’s Oration opens with Streamer turning to The Book of secrets to help him understand the language of cats. And indeed Magnus’s work does contain a ‘spell’ that would have helped Streamer in his quest:
If thou wilte understande the voices of brydes. Associate with … two felowes in the 28th dayes of October [and] go in to a certayne woode wyth dogges as too hunte, and [return] home wyth that beaste, whyche/thou shale fynd fyrst, and prepare it with the hart of a Foxe, [and] thou shalt understand anone the voyce of byrdes or beastes.30
Following Magnus’s instructions, although far from by the letter, Streamer enters a wood seeking a hedgehog, since he tells that reader ‘the flesh thereof [is] by nature full of natural heat—and therefore, the principal parts being eaten, must needs expulse gross matters and subtile the brain …’.31 Streamer searches for a hedgehog because he assumes he needs heat to purge his body of corruption and that once purged, he will be restored to a natural or pure state in which he will be able to hear the entire cosmos. It is the heat of the hedgehog which makes it particularly vital for Streamer, since he knows as a man of learning that heat is essential to the process of purgation.
Having procured the various animals that he needs to perform the charm, Streamer describes in detail the process of preparing the potion he is going to take:
The flesh I washed clean and put it in a poet, and with white wine, Mellisophillos or Melissa (commonly called blam), rosemary, newt’s tongue, four parts of the first and two of the second, I made a broth and set it on a fire and boiled it … in the seething whereof I had a pint of a pottle of wine which I put in the pot. Then, because it was the solstitium estivale, and that in confections the hours of the planets must for the better operation be observed, I tarried till ten o’ clock before dinner, what time Mercury began his lucky reign.32
Streamer’s account of the making of the potion that he is going to drink recognizably draws on Tudor medical writing. It could have been copied from the pages of The Antidotarius. Streamer gives the reader a detailed description of the preparation to fulfil his earlier promise that ‘because you be all my friends that are here I will hide nothing from you, but declare point to point how I behaved myself in both making and taking my philter’.33 Beware the Cat, or at least Streamer’s narrative, presents itself to the reader partly as a self-help work. It is intended to be informative and there is therefore a sense in which Streamer’s detailed description of the making of his potion is necessary so that others can follow in his footsteps. In these terms, Streamer is a parodic Borde or Hythloday, instructing his listeners (readers) on how to learn from his example.
Streamer’s failure as a narrator reflects his failures as a doctor and as a purveyor of advice. Ultimately, he cannot control his text and creates a work whose abundance reflects a trait that Cathy Shrank has argued typifies the work of Andrew Borde.34 Beware the Cat suggests that surrounding Streamer’s learned world is one of chaos and noise. Having taken the potion, Streamer finds he can hear everything:
And one shrewd wife a great way off (I think St Albans) called her husband ‘cuckold’ so loud and shrilly that I heard that plain; and would fain have heard the rest, but could not be no means for barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, rumbling of rats, gaggling of geese, humming of bees, rousing of bucks, gaggling of ducks, singing of swans, ringing of pans, crowing of cocks, sewing of socks, cackling of hens, scrabbling of pens, peeping of mice, trulling of dice, curling of frogs, and toads in bogs, chirking of crickets, shutting of wickets, shriking of owls, flittering of fowls, routing of knaves, snorting of slaves, farting of churls, fizzling of girls with many things else …35
When Streamer drinks the potion he plunges into a world of language. As the words mount up, the boundaries between different activities and species start to collapse. This passage creates equivalence between ‘the trulling of dice’ and the ‘flittering of fowls’. It also, however, yet again raises questions about Streamer’s status as a narrator, since it is impossible to read this passage and think that it is an accurate record of what happened after Streamer had drunk the potion. Does sewing socks make a sound? Is not this item simply in the list to provide a rhyme for ‘cocks’? But if this is the case, what is the meaning of this passage? The second Oration at times reads like a work of Tudor medicine, but in passages like this the reader is reminded of the poetic roots of Baldwin’s work. Ultimately, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are more important to Beware the Cat than The Antidotarius or the works of Albertus Magnus.
In Beware the Cat Baldwin consistently mocks humanist assumptions about human rationality through the specific qualities of prose. Andrew Hadfield comments that ‘Beware the Cat works by never allowing the reader to settle for easy answers and rest assured that the world can be neatly split into sheep and goats.’36 In Baldwin’s hands, the prose of Beware the Cat, in its lack of decorum, its refusal to respect any boundaries, spatial, temporal, or generic, and its mixing of fact and fiction, truth and lies, speech and print in a hotchpotch of nonsense, horror, humour, violence, and wisdom, becomes a printed rebuke to humanism. Lorna Hutson has argued that ‘For humanists, discourses in which the plot solution emerged from the order of telling were superior to discourses such as chivalric romances in which solutions were reached through the lapse, rather than the ordering, of narrative time.’37
Beware the Cat forces together the humanist emphasis on narrative with a number of other discourses to create a text in which narratological ordering simply disguises the chaos at its heart. Or rather, in which the desire of the reader for the order is itself mocked, particularly in the third of Streamer’s Orations, which largely comprises the testimony of a female cat, Mouse-slayer, who tells numerous stories of cat daring-do, most of which involve her exposing human stupidity and culpability. For example, at one stage Mouse-slayer tells the story of how she was once given walnut shell shoes and locked in an attic. The noise of her feet, however, made the superstitious country folk and their ignorant papist priests think the house was haunted and that Mouse-slayer was the Devil. Indeed, when the priests caught sight of her at the top of the ladder they were so scared that complete chaos ensured:
But when the priest heard me come, and/by a glimpsing had seen me, down he fell upon them that were behind him, and with his chalice hurt one, with his water pot another, and his holy candle fell into another priest’s breech (who, while the rest were hawsoning me, was conjuring our maid at the stair foot) and all to-besinged him … the old priest, which was so tumbled among them that his face lay upon a boy’s bare arse .. which for fear had beshit himself, had all to-rayed his face, he neither felt not smelt it, nor removed from him.38
The failure of the protagonists in this story to properly see and interpret Mouse-slayer is an image of a collective failure of interpretation. Mouse-slayer’s stories tell of a world of popular religion and folklore which she, and her human owners, constantly manipulate for their own ends. It is a world without any real moral or ethical code. To seek to interpret—or even worse moralize—Mouse-slayer’s world in good humanist fashion would be at best pointless or at worst folly. Mouse-slayer lives and thrives in the world of print, of fiction, of prose; a world in which ultimately what matters is how persuasive one’s story is, how clever one’s lies are, how powerful one’s fictions are.
Beware the Cat at one level echoes Geoffrey Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale in its provocative mixing of different genres in the context of a beast fable. But the Canterbury Tale it more directly evokes is The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale. The central figure in this tale is a Canon who is at once, like Baldwin’s cats, at the heart of the story and strangely dispersed or occluded. The Canon’s Yeoman opens by telling his readers that
Ther is a chanoun of religion
Amonges us, wolde infecte al a toun,
Though it was greet were as was Nynyvee,
Rome, Alisaundre, Troye, and othere three.
His sleights and his infinite falsenesse
Ther koude no man writen, as I gesse,
Though that he myghte lyve a thousand yeer.39
Given that the Tale is going to attempt to expose the Canon, this opening statement is a strangely pre-emptive statement of textual failure. The narrator knows in advance that his words cannot do full justice to the Canon’s slights and falseness. The Canon embodies a fictionality that it is beyond Chaucer’s fiction to express. Given this opening statement, it is perhaps not at all surprising to find that later in the tale the narrator seems to be in danger of being quite overcome by the Canon’s slipperiness: ‘It dulleth me whan that I of hym speke,/On his falsehede fayn wolde I me wreke,/If I wiste how, but he is heere and there;/He is so variaunt, he abit nowhere.’40 The Canon’s ability to be here, there, and nowhere is strangely feline and demonically protean. The Canon’s Yeoman hates the Canon’s falseness, his deceptions, tricks, and lies, and yet cannot draw his eyes away from the fantasy at their heart.
The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is a story about a failed transformation, about the performance, as opposed to the reality, of alchemical change. Matter in Chaucer’s tale is not turned to gold. Or rather, the transformation that takes place in this Tale is not material so much as graphic. The Canon’s Yeoman tells his tale to expose the tricks of his master and in the process transforms the base metal, the empty husks of alchemical discourse, into pleasurable, wondrous fiction: ‘Yet forgat I to maken rehersaille/Of waters corosif, and of lymaille,/And of bodies mollificacioun/And also of hire induracioun/Oilles, ablucions, and metal fusible—’.41 The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is poised between the protean quality of the Canon and the graphic specificity of the words of alchemy. The Yeoman’s attempts to master the tension between the protean and the specific, literal and metaphorical, reflect the extent to which he represents the trials and pleasures of authorship. Lee Patterson comments that ‘Although alchemical study was incapable of making gold, it could produce alchemists: and although it was unable to change the material world, mastering its elaborate theory could change the self-identity of the alchemist. What alchemy provided, in short, was a way to be an intellectual.’42 The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is the story of the emergence of a particular kind of author—one poised between embracing the possibilities offered by texts and textuality, the play of significance, and nostalgia for a world (which of course never actually existed) in which words and meaning were one. Turning the Canon’s tricks into a tale at once makes them public and reduces their power—they are made real and at the same moment rendered powerless. This is, of course, what the Canon’s Yeoman wanted to achieve, but lurking at the edges of his tale is a desire for alchemy, for real transformation, for a world in which words and meaning are one. Beware the Cat is a work of alchemy. It mocks popular wisdom and knowledge, and at the same time expresses a desire to escape the endless textual stream of Streamer’s text into an oral world of feline logic—it desires transformation, but ultimately knows that all it can create is alchemists, not gold.
The Third Part of Master Streamer’s Oration opens with Streamer waking from a sleep induced by the disgusting potion that he had early brewed. At this point in the story the reader is expecting to hear cat’s speak, or rather hear what they are saying, but instead Baldwin mocks us with more Streamer nonsense. The third Oration opens with a lengthy digression on the moon, stars, and sun.
For you shall understand—chiefly you, Master Willot, that are my lord’s astronomer—that all our ancestors have failed in knowledge of natural causes; for it is not the moon that causeth the sea to ebb and flow, neither to neap and spring, but the neaping and springing of the sea is the cause of the moon’s waxing and waning. For the moonlight is nothing save the shining of the sun cast into the element by opposition of the sea; as also the stars are nothing else but the sunlight reflected upon the face of rivers and cast upon the crystalline heaven, which because rivers alway keep like course, therefore are the stars alway of one bigness.43
Even by Streamer’s standards this is nonsense. It is almost as though Baldwin is betting that the reader is now so committed to the story that they will not put the story down even when confronted with a passage like this. Finally, Beware the Cat reaches some actual cats and it transpires that what Streamer has been listening to at night is not simply cats talking, but is rather a formal court of cat law with Mouse-slayer defending herself against the charge of breaking cat law by refusing to have sex with a male cat, Catch-rat. Mouse-slayer’s defence is to declare her entire like since her ‘blind days’ of her kitling in order to prove that despite her refusal of Catch-rat’s advances she has always been a good cat—in other words, that she has been duplicitous, deceitful, lecherous, and exploitative of her human masters.
The third Oration is Baldwin’s ultimately mockery of his readers since, having waited so long to hear a cat speak, the matter of Mouse-slayer’s narrative is stories of stories of human stupidity and culpability. Streamer has consumed a disgusting potion and the reader has consumed Streamer’s nonsensical words, and Baldwin’s foolish text, just to hear an account of human folly. For example, Mouse-slayer tells the cat court about her time as a pet to an ‘old bawd’ who ran a boarding house frequented by young men. It was this bawd’s policy to provide the young men with wenches and to soak them for all they had so that the young men were forced to resort to stealing to get by. Mouse-slayer is very complimentary about the old bawd telling the court that ‘And notwithstanding that she used these wicked practices, yet was she very holy and religious. And therefore, although that all images were forbidden, yet kept she one of Our Lady in her coffer.’44 Despite this, there was one occasion when the old bawd treated Mouse-slayer badly, which was when one of her young men fell in love with a rich merchant’s wife. The old bawd befriended the wife and invited her to dinner. Before she arrived, however, the old bawd had fed Mouse-slayer a piece of pudding filled with mustard which made Mouse-slayer cry. When the two women were sitting down, Mouse-slayer came in and sat by the old bawd, prompting the merchant’s wife to ask what ailed Mouse-slayer. The old bawd answered that God had punished her daughter, for either her daughter’s honesty or cruelty, by turning her into the likeness of a cat, ‘wherein she hath been above this two months, continually weeping as you see and lamenting her miserable wretchedness’.45 Perhaps not surprisingly, the merchant’s wife relents and agrees to take the old bawd’s young man as a lover. This story is ‘borrowed’ wholesale by Baldwin, probably from William Caxton’s Fables of Aesop (1483), where there is a lengthy version of it. The fact that part of Mouse-slayer’s testimony is an old tale stolen from another work is parodic. Streamer does not notice the provenance of the story, but then neither does the cat court. The third Oration of Beware the Cat presents itself as a piece of sworn testimony, but like the rest of the work it is another patchwork text woven together and made to look whole by the linked transformative powers of print and Streamer’s narrative voice.
Mouse-slayer ends her testimony by summing up her defence: ‘Thus have I told you, my lords, all things that have been done and happened through me, wherein you perceive my loyalty and obedience to all good laws, and how shamelessly and falsely I am accused for a transgressor.’46 Of course, this statement begs the question, what are ‘good’ laws? In the world of cats it is lawful, indeed required, to be greedy, lecherous, and disloyal to one’s humans. A good cat is one who uses tricks and lies to get what they want. In Utopia the people are good because the founder, Utopus, has set down laws that mean it is almost impossible not to be virtuous. This, however, suggests that virtue in Utopia, the place, not the book, is largely meaningless. In the world of Mouse-slayer, and in the printed world of Tudor prose, to be virtuous is to lie and trick, to flatter and deceive. It is to use the ability of words to transform things, to make base metals gold and fictions true, simply to satisfy the reader’s desire for bawdy tales and merry jests. The ‘best’ books are those, like Beware the Cat, that allow the reader to pretend, to convince themselves that they are reading to gain knowledge, to find out about faraway lands, potent medicines, and hidden secrets—when all that they are reading is folly, foolishness, and the ramblings of fools.
The Third Part of Streamer’s Oration ends on a melancholic note. Streamer promises that he has many more mysteries, far more wondrous to tell, but in the meantime ‘I will pray you to help to get me some money to convey me on my journey to Caithness, for I have been going thither these five years and never was able to perform my journey.’47 One feels that Streamer will never make it to Caithness since he will not be able to keep to the main road or indeed to any recognized route. Instead, he will constantly be going off in different directions, down side alleys and dark lanes. There is, however, a sense that despite all of Streamer’s failures as a narrator, the banality of much of Mouse-slayer’s discourse, and the ridiculous claims that Streamer makes throughout the course of the text, the reader has been on a genuine journey which is now coming to an end. R. W. Maslen comments that, ‘despite his association with hypocrisy, superstition, and manifest folly, Streamer is a vehicle for the truth—an Erasmian mock philosopher’.48 Beware the Cat is a work of alchemy. It turns its readers into consumers of fiction, forges them as intellectuals (if to be an intellectual is to possess Streamer’s knowledge and skills), and makes literary critics look wise (since clearly only a fool would treat a work like Beware the Cat seriously)—Beware the Cat indeed.
Hadfield, Andrew. Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Hutson, Lorna. ‘Fortunate Travellers: Reading for the Plot in Sixteenth-Century England’, Representations, 41 (1993): 83–103.
Maslen, Robert W. Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage, and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).
——– ‘William Baldwin and the Tudor Imagination’, in Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature, 1485–1603 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 291–306.
Shrank, Cathy. Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Wear, Andrew. Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).