Provocative claims about an eighteenth-century “rise of fictionality” (Gallagher) have prompted critics to construct more persuasive accounts of premodern prose fiction and the modern European novel.Footnote 1 No matter how critics chart the novel tradition, Tudor prose requires further study, for histories of imaginative prose remain incomplete if not incoherent without the recognition of a major narratological break: Tudor prose breaks with long-standing conventions that join imaginative storytelling to the third person. Across language families, the threshold to fiction has long been marked by third-person formulas (“once upon a time …,” “there once was …”) that announce a story’s reach beyond the limits of its storyteller, its crucial remove from any one speaker’s private, day-to-day experience. Medieval dream visions and other poetic traditions, of course, provided for first-person points of view. But the folktales, chronicles, jestbooks, fables, epics, romances, and biblical accounts circulating through sixteenth-century England most often defaulted to the third person as a narrative norm.
It is only from a retrospective look—when eighteenth-century texts are allowed to serve as “early” examples of English prose fiction—that any native affinity seems to hold between the first-person prose narrator and formal modes of literary emplotment. Especially before the standardization of quoted speech indicators, first-person narration was beset with difficulties. Even as first-person prose narration moves in the eighteenth century toward novelistic convention, Daniel Defoe’s best-known narrator is downright apologetic about it: “I shall no longer trouble the story with a relation in the first person, which will put me to the expense of ten thousand said I’s, and said he’s …,” Robinson Crusoe promises in a sequel (41). First-person narration is so far from native to English prose fiction that Defoe’s reference stands among the earliest recorded instances in which a grammatical position, the prima persona of Latin textbooks, is redeployed as an English descriptor of written narrative. Defoe’s readers will have to wait another two centuries before the “first-person narrator” as a phrasal unit becomes a standard part of the critical lexicon.Footnote 2
This essay argues that Tudor prose initiates a break from the third person. More importantly, this essay aims to show on the grounds of William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (ca. 1553)—a text that features no fewer than three first-person narrators—just how and why this break occurred. To see how is to grasp why, for Baldwin’s text makes its own practice exemplary. It is nothing if not an ongoing demonstration of the first person’s practice and necessity. The first person emerges as a deliberate means to insert minoritized apertures within the authoritative—and as Baldwin’s text suggests, closed and partial—second- and third-person discourses of law, natural philosophy, and literature. A later narratological concept like Juri Lotman’s “sentient center” is helpful here: it directs readers from literary characters as figures of action and personality to those elemental sites Lotman treats as imprecisely defined quotients of “consciousness…capable of generating a [literary] structure” (339). Baldwin’s first persons figure in an extended sense as sentient, or better yet “conscient,” centers. The first persons of Beware the Cat function as practical devices—apertures that create perspectival openings—as much as they do persons in the modern sense of legally constituted entities endowed with rights and responsibilities.Footnote 3 Baldwin’s variously occupied centers should be conceived of alongside his filters (his devices of selection) as inlets or apertures (devices of sensory access). Baldwin’s first persons serve as formal apertures: they constellate a set of nonnormative sensory capacities that Beware the Cat mobilizes to throw open prevailing, and much idealized, conventions governing literary authorship and public speech. Put another way, the first person enters Tudor prose fiction as the formal aperture fitted to minoritized points of view.
Baldwin’s exuberantly maximalist text remains less well known than it should be even among period specialists, so a synopsis is in order, and a caution, too. The Tudor work modern editors have called an early novel defies summary; there is too much of everything in it.Footnote 4 In brief: a narrator named Streamer abandons the courtesies of debate, ingests a sense-altering substance, morphs into a sensitive perceptual filter against a vastly expanded range of stimuli, attunes himself to the discourse of cats, and finally recounts all these sensations in a single pass. Streamer’s altered senses allow him to observe, above all, a cat on trial named Mouse-Slayer who stands in her own defense. This feline narrator faces criminal charges for resisting sexual advances; Mouse-Slayer prepares to give her side of the story. If erring humans are dull, their furtive companions are perpetually alert, endowed with an acuity that recalls the conscience’s awareness and discomfiting moral knowledge (see also King 388). They are watching. When Streamer had first taken an interest in exactly what it is that Mouse-Slayer’s kind knows, Beware the Cat had exchanged Aesopian lore for a hands-on inquiry: from within a print-house compound, the human narrator pursues experiments to find out, in effect, what it is like to be a cat. The human narrator, in other words, aspires to the cat’s sensory access, eventually attaining heightened capacities that can be sustained only at great risk in first-person form.
Toggling as it does between nonhuman animals and print-house workers, Beware the Cat suggests an alternative genealogy for the first-person narrator, a genealogy in tension with the term’s invocations of primacy and personhood. Beware the Cat’s formal experiment answers, after all, to a historical juncture when shifting legal provisions—the successive regime changes of the 1550s—force attention to nonnormative positions and persons on the margins. Baldwin’s first-person narrators direct access in a time of intense political uncertainty to minoritized positions, ones especially liable to fictive representation from powerful third-person discourses and requiring inventiveness in kind. Baldwin’s narrators finally derive their claims to moral knowledge from the cultivation of modes of near-feline hypersensitivity. The oldest form of “beware” in the English language, not coincidentally, has to do with redoubled awareness—it has to do with “being aware.”Footnote 5 The minoritized beings of late Tudor prose—so strangely attentive, news-obsessed, and ready to review legal as well as literary codes—seek shelter in the form of the first person.
“All Our Ill Doings”: A Publication History
In a phrase that suggests why Baldwin’s novel has not become the canonical mainstay it could be, one modern critic reads Beware the Cat not quite ironically as “an exercise in foolish writing” (Betteridge 140).Footnote 6 Between its freewheeling plot and a conscience catty enough to upend the sterner dignities of moral discourse, Baldwin’s supposed idiosyncrasy risks irrelevance. Yet its audacity made it far more influential among Shakespeare’s contemporaries than the work’s critical reception suggests. Audiences then as now have noticed what one recent critic has characterized as the text’s calculated thwarting of its narrators’ “attempt[s] to distinguish confidently between self and other” (Hadfield 147). The marked feline-human divide offers only the most telling of these thwarted distinctions. When the narrator Mouse-Slayer stands trial for sexual noncooperation, the most reductive readings—ones that would equate cats with Catholics, for example—become untenable. The text pulls off a far more elaborate plot twist, as the figure ostensibly on trial comes to put the whole legal system on trial.Footnote 7 Mouse-Slayer recounts her accuser’s domestic negligence and rape attempt, neither of which is recognized under feline law as an offense. Baldwin’s satire offers a concluding gloss for this narrator: she is the “devil’s cat…[that] seeth and writeth all our ill doings” (54), an agent of inexpedient knowledge that bears witness, in this case, against the ill doings of the legal system at large (see also King 388). First-person narration works especially to expose the law’s lopsided, third-person provisions. On the stand, Mouse-Slayer will further attest to her law-abiding character by recounting honorable (that is to say, petty and violent) pranks played on human offenders with whom she once lived in closed quarters. At once subjects under the masculinist demands of feline law and the eager enforcers of another stringent code against humans, Baldwin’s perceptive, witch-worshiping cats are, to put it mildly, ambiguous creatures.
Neither Baldwin nor Beware the Cat’s boldly conceived premise would be soon forgotten. Despite serving as a printer’s assistant or corrector (a role that his character Streamer reprises), Baldwin comes to be recognized as one of the foremost writers of his day.Footnote 8 It is a claim more tantalizing than this essay’s limits can bear, but readers should find—even in passing—good reason to believe that Tudor dramatists knew this most outrageous of Baldwin’s works. The Elizabethan stage seems to nod at both Mouse-Slayer and, as readers will see, her final prank—her memorable assault on a human lover hiding behind a “painted cloth” (50). Consider their resonances in Hamlet’s play within the play, the one its playwright names “The Mousetrap” and deploys to “catch the conscience of the king” (3.2.231, 3.1.540). Think, too, of the Shakespearean monologist’s attack on another concealed lover (“A rat!” Hamlet shouts as he stabs Polonius through the arras [3.4.22]). The publication history of Beware the Cat gestures more broadly to a text whose narrative inlets outlast its most immediate engagement with current events. Penned in early 1553 as Edward VI’s failing health set off a succession crisis, the work—with its glances at Marian rule—once appeared unsuitable for the press. By Elizabeth’s accession, the manuscript could be produced for a wider readership, and it likely reached print in 1561, just years before Baldwin’s death (Ko). Two editions from separate publishers then appeared in 1570, one more in 1584, and yet another at the close of the English Civil War in 1652 (Ringler, Textual note xxix). When the historian John Stow in A Survey of London (1598) discusses the history of Aldersgate and its gatehouse—which, importantly enough for Beware the Cat, housed an eminent printer (see also Blayney 706)—the scholar is unembarrassed by his familiarity with Baldwin’s text, referring to it in marginal notes (C7r). The text had staying power.
The text’s uproarious elements gave it a place among seventeenth-century entertainments, even as pivotal moments of its publication history tell of its first persons’ significance for minoritized groups. Jane Bell, who had a catalog heavy on texts of “pleasant mirth and delight for young people” (Historie), was one of the few printers between 1642 and 1660 to publish Shakespearean playtexts (Wright 79). Besides a 1655 edition of King Lear, Bell’s house printed easy-reading texts with protagonists ranging from Amadis de Gaul and Guy of Warwick to Reynard the Fox; Bell also printed the 1652 edition of Beware the Cat (Ringler, Textual note xxix). More supple approaches are needed for a work as multifaceted as this one. It is a text, after all, that appeals through its overlapping narrators and direct address to mixed audiences; Baldwin addresses his dedicatory epistle to John Young, the prominent Catholic disputant who under Mary’s rule would become Cambridge’s vice chancellor (Hause). Beware the Cat’s depiction of criminal truth-telling seems to have reached across confessional lines, as the curious but critically unremarked path of the text’s transmission attests. Elizabethan readers encountered the text thanks to a pair of printers targeted by authorities for alleged Catholic sympathies. John and Edward Allde, the father and son who printed the 1570 and 1584 editions, respectively, took enormous risks with their press lists. The younger Allde’s publication of a Catholic text in the 1590s would end in the seizure of his press (Gadd). The fungible positions within Beware the Cat’s apertures may well have been most apparent to those excluded at any given time from the prevailing religious settlement.
Prose stylists paid attention, redeploying Baldwin’s narrators across partisan bounds. In the thick of the Marprelate controversy (1588–89), a writer better known for his prose fiction, Thomas Nashe, assumed readers’ familiarity with Beware the Cat. Nashe’s persona in An Almond for a Parrot turns Baldwin’s stealthy observer against the anti-episcopal types he calls Puritans, invoking both Beware the Cat’s dissections (of which more soon) and its surveilling conscience. “I am a shrewd fellow at the uncasing of a fox,” he writes, “and have cat’s eyes to look into every corner of a Puritan’s house” (D3v). The first-person narrator of Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) offers a further riposte to Baldwin, answering talk of England’s ill doings with the traveler’s insight: vice abroad is much worse. Baldwin’s first-person narrators lent themselves to being variously filled and recast as radical Puritans, crypto-Catholics, Church of England loyalists, even wartime journalists. In English Civil War newsbooks a century after Baldwin’s composition, Marchamont Nedham is still alluding to a stealthy cat with print-house access. Nedham brags in the Royalist periodical Mercurius Pragmaticus (1647–49) of “a familiar that creeps” like Baldwin’s narrators “into all…conventicles and counsels.” Nedham warns members of Parliament about their deliberations; none can so much as “wag his beard but I will give the results of all in either House, and the world shall have a copy of every man’s conscience” (qtd. in Peacey 220). The first-person newsbook imagines that parliamentary counsel will be printed for all to read. The sixteenth-century writer lends voice to the experience of rising news flows, streams of communications that, even without the decisive force of official speech acts, were shaping popular perceptions. Baldwin’s hybrid subjects come to figure the press’s suspect energies, those first-person issues released to the streets with unmanageable, or rather unherdable, lives of their own. Beware the cat, indeed.
Against Turn Taking; or, Switching On the First-Person Aperture
For all its disorienting comic elements, Beware the Cat is formally deliberate to the point of straining credulity. It marks from the start a switch to first-person narration. Baldwin the narrator-character recalls a late-night encounter months earlier, when those planning the Edwardian court’s winter festivities had fallen into a dispute. Three members of this entourage are sharing a room with Baldwin; none are more incensed than Baldwin’s character at plans for an Aesop-inspired production involving birds.Footnote 9 What begins as a belated objection to poor stage decorum (the narrator Baldwin fumes that it is “uncomely” and indecent for humans to play the role of talking birds) winds toward a more speculative dialogue on the real, the implicit associations of speech and reason, logos and logic (5). The participants move intuitively from literary-critical questions to a natural philosophical one—do creatures have reason?—when one Gregory Streamer, the most historically obscure of them all, reverses the query. What happens when humans aspire to creaturely sensation? Streamer’s redirection of the exchange is no less striking than his proposed formal intervention. He promises to recount a relevant experience from his stay at a print house on the condition that he can proceed uninterrupted.
The text thus teases turn-taking procedures from those of drama to philosophical dialogue and even the academic disputation before summarily dismissing them as inadequate to the problem at hand: fuller immersion is needed. The four roommates notably make up a quorum for academic disputation: two disputants, their dueling points of view, and an impartial, attentive audience are at the ready. Against Baldwin’s dissenting position, Streamer has from another bed laid out the positive position, “affirm[ing] that beasts and fowls had reason, and that as much as men, yea, and in some points more.” Each of their bedfellows are awakened by the disagreement, and the latecomers “hearkened to us, but would take part on neither side”; they effectively withhold judgment, preparing instead to weigh the claims from each side. As Baldwin the narrator launches into his argument, however, “alleging for my proof,” as he puts it, the “authority of most grave and learned philosophers,” Streamer scraps the debate format. If the two are well-versed in humanist practices of arguing in utramque partem, the text refuses to showcase that rhetorical knack for taking up both sides of the question. It has Streamer propose instead—suitably enough given his name—a mode of ongoing first-person narration. Baldwin’s interlocutor in other words exchanges disputation’s formal equipoise for a continuous channel of inquiry; this unbroken narrative stream soon integrates multimodal sensory capacities. Beware the Cat casts about for another narrative procedure that can connect successive stimuli as they alter each other as well as the senses themselves on the way to constituting distinctive—and for Tudor prose fiction, underrepresented—subject positions. Streamer’s condition for proceeding (“hear me, and without any interruption till I have done”) further frames first-person narration as a demanding, cooperative attainment, an experimental procedure requiring modes of audience compliance then far from assured (6).
Despite clear divides among narrative sections, Beware the Cat’s three narrators read as intermingling, almost trinitarian, identities. Its first narrator, speaking from within the story as the author Baldwin himself, dissents before endorsing Streamer’s views so firmly that he commits to recording their exchange, even “as Plato did by Socrates” (3). Though Baldwin is known as an author, he is also shown in the historical record to have served as a corrector in a leading Edwardian print house—precisely the circumstances in which readers find Beware the Cat’s second narrator. Streamer will in turn so fully alter his senses to align with Mouse-Slayer’s species that, in one startling moment of the cat’s narration, he bursts out “laugh[ing] with the rest in a cat’s voice” (49). Baldwin’s converging narrators lend themselves to structuralist readings that maintain a remove from the world of particularized referents and more generally toggle from human to device, person to form.Footnote 10 Whether or not his figures can be read as fully elaborated and separable characters is almost beside the point. For the narrators of this Tudor text function as interchangeable devices—incompletely occupied apertures that organize a set of sensory capacities.
“Hard by the Printing House”
The narrative locates Streamer from the start not as a cloistered scholar but a producer of textbooks who must stay near the print house, serving from time to time as his own corrector.Footnote 11 Streamer recalls at his narrative’s inception a rather specific task and period of housing insecurity: “[I was] lodged…at my friend’s house…[on top of the print house where] I lay oftentimes,…sometime for lack of other lodging, and sometime as while my Greek alphabets were in printing to see that it might truly be corrected” (9). It has become critical tradition to note that Beware the Cat satirizes Streamer and his narrative style as pompous.Footnote 12 The text does go out of its way to insist on the scholar-divine’s publication record (the fictional Streamer has authored at least two books) and extensive language learning (besides Greek and Latin, Streamer reportedly knows “C[haldean], Arabic, and Egyptian”) (17). But the text more significantly points up the corrector’s qualifications alongside his precarious standing. Print-house correctors like Baldwin needed to be erudite; their extraordinary language skills were required to parse unprinted source material. Learned scholars who moved between author manuscripts and printed proofs, editing both, correctors were hard to place socially; “their status,” one historian observes, “posed a problem” (Grafton 43). Notoriously underemployed in relation to their intellectual attainments, correctors found themselves in proletarianized positions that drew the contempt and pity of prominent contemporaries. Correctors labored over the details of texts—the same texts that might bear their names only in cases of outstanding error. As late as 1700, polemicists were still invoking the print-house position as a taunt: their sorry opponents had once worked as correctors (42–43).
On one hand, then, the first-person narrator—constructed against the silence of Streamer’s audience—serves as a sensory inlet to a more or less closed space. The metropolis in 1553 by one authoritative count held no more than thirteen print houses, and it was not every bookstall browser who, like Streamer, could enter one of these production sites (Blayney 606). On the other hand, Beware the Cat chooses for this first person an occupant whose consummate literary skill manifests in invisible terms. A figure of anonymized labor with few fictional forebears, the corrector runs little risk of saturating the narrative function with some enthralling aura; this is a figure that, like the aperture, can be seen quite through. Muttering darkly about other scholars who have won plum church positions with a bit of Latin and ease on the bowling green, Beware the Cat’s narrator makes ends meet through attaching himself to a print enterprise, one whose favors had long been limited to those like him but were increasingly, in the twilight of Edwardian rule, on the brink for many others besides.
Streamer’s press relations had led him to stay, as he explains in suspiciously rich detail, at
a friend’s house of mine, which…standeth at Saint Martin’s Lane end and hangeth partly upon the town wall that is called Aldersgate….
[At this friend’s place] I was lodged in a chamber hard by the Printing House, which had a fair bay window opening into the garden, the earth whereof is almost as high at Saint Anne’s Church top, which standeth thereby. (9–10)
The narrator’s Greek textbook is fictional; the unnamed place is not. Though Streamer’s double, the historical figure Baldwin, served as a corrector for the prolific Edward Whitchurch, the facilities of another printer are those shown here. Precise directions point to what contemporary readers recognized as the even more impressive print house of John Day. The printer lived in the gatehouse of one of London’s ancient gates; Day’s print house was literally built into and identified with the civic infrastructure (Stow C7r). This portal convened the international expertise that kept English presses going. A census of immigrants reveals that this site alone housed at least four Dutch artisans in 1549 and may well have been a hub for what one historian describes as a refugee community (Pettegree 299–322).Footnote 13 Day’s skilled printers would under Elizabeth publish John Foxe’s massive Acts and Monuments (1563) and the very first English sonnet sequence, the one famously attributed to Anne Lock.Footnote 14 In Baldwin’s novel, though, the ardently Protestant printer remains anonymous, and Day never shows up on the premises identified with his name (Phillips 96). The text’s combination here of exactly elaborated detail, withheld identifications, and that absent center is suggestive of a pervasive narrative logic. That lively but hollowed-out device of the print house supplies, after all, a fitting image for Beware the Cat’s first persons—narrative apertures that, as in the case of the near-transparent corrector, constellate modes of sensory access that open into foreclosed discursive structures.
Day’s absence tracks moreover with what Baldwin may have known of printers’ plans amid political uncertainty. In early 1553, the period when Beware the Cat was likely written, the young Edward’s illness foretold the collapse of a reformation-oriented regime. Many of London’s printers found themselves newly severed from working notions of personhood—that is, they found themselves readier than ever to abandon established places in the civic realm for barer forms of life. Some printers, known quantities whose Protestant leanings made them targets for Edward’s successors, went underground. In the five months before Mary’s coronation in October 1553, seven of the city’s print houses, including that of Baldwin’s own employer, Whitchurch, suddenly stopped printing (Blayney 756–57).Footnote 15 Day left London. From a location so discreet it has yet to be conclusively identified, Day’s crew operated a secret press, producing the pseudonymous “Michael Wood” pamphlets that would challenge Marian policies (Blayney 802–03; Evenden 29–30); these laborers in effect laid down a model for the Marprelate project—and its vigorous first-person voice—three decades later. Composed at the height of uncertainty in early 1553, Beware the Cat thus draws readers into an enterprise, one whose most prominent practitioners were making plans to shutter production, keep their presses rolling, and perhaps even stay alive.
By drawing dense circumstantial details and obscure first persons together, Beware the Cat creates an effect of sharply felt particularity that traverses individual bounds. Instead of an exegetical approach from outside to inside, shadowy types to truth, the device that is Baldwin’s first-person narrator works from inside out. Streamer functions, again, as a minor aperture: the narrator offers insider access to cultural productions to which he contributes in an uncredited, invisible capacity. Far from constituting a person of growing consequence, the narrator’s encounters organize perceptual fields of liminal awareness. The first person provides a phenomenal opening through which more total crisis must be grasped: the particular precarity under which Tudor correctors once labored now attends the print enterprise more fully. That same troubled aperture also, however, offers a glimpse of the path ahead. Correctors who have honed their knowledge of printing in constantly adverse conditions can, more than others, foresee the operation’s agility, its capacity to keep up production when and where least encouraged. Streamer’s stint at the press opens a window onto a shaky communications platform that works not least of all to refract unknown first-person voices into uncanny others.
“Cats Carry News”: Communications Networks and the Rewriting of the Secrets Genre
Print-house communications soon lead the corrector to undertake his most consequential act of literary experimentation. Unable to sleep at night because of nearby cats’ “groaning” and “squeal[ing],” Streamer seeks out the company of print-house servants, falling in with at least three others whose fireside talk recalls the roommates’ opening debate (23). Streamer cannot believe the servants’ stories of talking cats. Their hair-raising anecdotes meet, however, with mutual corroboration: a whisper network seems to link ferociously intelligent cats across land and sea. The print-house servants map a preexisting communications network whose swift, far-flung transmissions seem a stretch. Agile figures allowed in homes and on international waterways, cats (if the servants are to be believed) transmit current information, parcels of knowledge of greatest interest to print-house workers. As one servant patiently explains to the astonished Streamer, this communications network stretches all over; cats aboard ships “bring news unto their fellows out of all quarters” (14). The marginal commentary solemnly backs the claim: “Cats carry news” (14). The corrector meets for the first time with the possibility of a vast information superhighway traversed by creatures he thought he knew. Beware the Cat confronts its most insistent advocate of first-person narration with able carriers and an unauthorized, barely credible mode of discourse: these stealthy agents serve as couriers borne on swift currents, precursors of swells still to come. Well in advance of the next century’s flood of newsbooks and corantos, Beware the Cat envisions from within the print house a fluid cast of alert, anonymous beings joined through the press’s circulation of contemporary occurrence.
From this point on, the narrator’s relation to his own printed volumes undergoes a sea change. Around the print-house workers who know of talking cats in Ireland and further signal their interest in continental news, the corrector looks ignorant; his studies have not helped.Footnote 16 When the clock strikes nine, the fireside chat breaks off. Streamer tries to regain his usual focus: “I went straight to my chamber…and took a book in my hand to have studied,” he recounts, “but the remembrance of this former talk so troubled me that I could think of nothing else …” (22). Streamer must decide how to substantiate claims he cannot put out of mind. In one of the narrative’s most ludicrously distended sections, the corrector undertakes an in-house experiment to access feline speech; in one of the subtler of Baldwin’s jokes, he consults a book first. The prominence of this tome—a book of secrets attributed to the thirteenth-century magus figure Albertus Magnus that promises, among other powers, access to the speech of birds and beasts—appears at first puzzling, and wholly out of proportion to its effects. For Streamer proceeds as if he had not looked at the text at all, improvising for pages without following the recipe he first sought and even transcribes.
Streamer redirects the secrets genre and its habits of imaginative sampling, channeling them—as he does again with those turn-taking discourses—through the first-person aperture. Beware the Cat names three fictional books, works supposedly authored or translated by Streamer, but the book of secrets the corrector finds in his library has a real historical counterpart. The Latin work to which Streamer refers was printed in London by William Maclyn in 1483, which is to say in the very infancy of English printing (Liber). The medicinal and magical recipes of how-to books like this one were sources of contemporary amusement, and their appeal has much to do with their copious range. This work from pseudo-Albertus gives techniques for gaining an array of marvelous capacities including, as the sixteenth-century English translation puts it, the power to overcome one’s enemies, achieve inner peace, “slay debate,” get sleeping men to talk, and make rainbows appear (Boke C6r; see also Liber). This encyclopedic range is brought under formal control by the work’s second-person address, which personalizes each entry: “if thou wilt [achieve this or that],” then do such and such, the magus figure promises reassuringly each time (Boke C1r). Such promises invite methods of desultory perusal—readers can dip in and out to discover yet another fun hypothetical or unspoken fantasy. The experimental logic lodged within such texts was also, however, gaining ground in the sixteenth century, hence the uptick in the genre’s popularity after having been around for centuries (Eamon 9). The secrets genre in one important reading provides the “missing link” for bridging premodern and modern notions of experiment: the genre mediates among Hellenistic and medieval notions of experiment as private, fortuitous encounter with the marvelous on the one hand, and the more modern, Baconian impulse to share results of collaborative testing among virtual practitioners on the other (Eamon 9). Streamer can be seen then to consult a divided text. The secrets genre invites experimental involvement even as it undermines methodical inquiry. The book of secrets provides recipe after recipe, after all, even as its abundance confirms for readers that they need not create concoctions best imaginatively sampled.
The reading patterns encouraged by the secrets genre—the piecemeal consult, the perusal seeking commonplace (or, from another angle, personalized) extracts over and above a sequential whole—were those imposed by readers too, of course, on many an authoritative text. Without launching into the full-on confutation that no one asked for, Beware the Cat models another epistemic procedure. Streamer’s intervention in the secrets genre recalls, again, the opening frame’s departure from turn-taking discourses. Tudor humanists might with their illustrious forebears sample widely and entertain all sides of a question; one might also with the print-house servants pursue one single, urgent problem and test out in turn their most audacious claims. Streamer concentrates the volume’s imaginative sampling through that by-now familiar aperture. He provides a brief translation from the Latin edition before revising that passage’s content—and most importantly for my purposes, its form—down to the sentence level, recasting conditional second-person directives (those “if-then” promises) into a first-person account. The text, in other words, enacts its represented experiment by subjecting the secrets genre to a formal one, pushing the secrets genre from a speculative second person (that “if” clause indexing the always imminent, never performed experiment) toward a narrating “I” with its sequences of past action:
I took a piece of the cat’s liver and a piece of the kidney…. All these I beat in a mortar together…and then made a cake of it, and baked it upon a hot stone till it was dry like bread. And while this was a-baking, I took seven parts of the cat’s grease…all the kite’s brain, with…the juice of her heart, the upper beak and the middle claw of her left foot…. All these things I pounded together in a mortar by the space of an hour, and then I put it in a cloth and hung it over a basin in the sun, out of which dropped within four hours after about half a pint of oil very fair and clear. (27–28)
Besides milking the gross-out factor that is clearly part of the text’s delight (and playing on the devilry others imagine of a place that revises prayer books), Beware the Cat draws on the secrets genre to convey a sense that the marvelous is at hand. The reproductive capacities of the print house not long ago seemed as unlikely as any of the superpowers promised by such books. Baldwin’s recasting of the genre into the first person further subjects secretive conventions to another attitude of inquiry. It is not, notably enough, Streamer the corrector who cuts philosophers with outsized names down to size (as many critics have noticed, Streamer is one of the text’s satirical butts); it is rather Beware the Cat’s formal opening that intervenes across the genre. Its narrative aperture invites readers who use the I pronoun to differently inhabit, to dwell in texts—recipes as well as fireside thrillers—that more often cue incidental sampling. The text once again leads with its sentient center: Beware the Cat’s first person opens an extended, interchangeable aperture through which collaborators are drawn into the cumulative, sequential protocols of experimental inquiry.
From Philter to Filter; or, Seeking Romance’s Others
Streamer’s experiment to exceed the outer limits of human receptivity proves risky—and partially successful. His bid for heightened sense awareness moreover reveals an emergent literary relation: prose fiction’s first person comes to be defined against, even constituted through, an implied background of sensory plenitude. The text strains Streamer’s senses to a breaking point beyond which the corrector finds himself attuned to Mouse-Slayer’s kind. From there, Streamer cedes the narration to his feline counterpart. The most acutely perceptive first person of them all, Mouse-Slayer’s keen aperture forces open discursive structures from the legal realm to the literary one that have, as her narration suggests, proved no shelter to the marginalized subjects they may well create.
Streamer’s elaborate preparations (recall his baking project) yield a series of treatments the narrator uses to modify his senses. It has not to my knowledge been observed that Beware the Cat’s neologism for Streamer’s concoction also provides a keyword on which the whole text—and perhaps beyond it, a mode and genre—turn. Streamer calls his preparation a “philter,” a word derived from Greek and Latin terms for a drug or potion that usually summons romantic attraction (in Greek ϕίλτρον, in Latin philtrum).Footnote 17 While the corrector’s panicked reaction draws the attention of baffled servants, it summons zero love interests and none of the kisses pseudo-Albertus’s recipe anticipates (“whosoever thou kissest shall understand [birds and beasts] as well as thyself,” Streamer’s translation promises [25]). What is more, as readers come to learn, the text takes aim through Mouse-Slayer’s narrative at “romance”—both in the colloquial sense of sentimental coupling and the literary-critical sense of “idealizing” narrative traditions (McKeon 3). The text’s inclusion of a “philter,” then, is odd. Its prominence resonates with a homophone of growing importance. The English noun “felt” is a homely mishmash evoking none of the excitement of classical aphrodisiacs. But that mixture of wool, fur, and hair compacted by a pressure roller is the substance from which the noun “filter” derives. In the last half of the sixteenth century, and not least of all through Baldwin’s usage, this humble substance detaches from the more general action it enables, and the abstracted verb “filter” comes to describe many other sorting processes.Footnote 18
Streamer, as Beware the Cat would have it, administers a philter and ends up a filter. The narratological implications of that porous, latter term and its sorting actions were obvious to at least one influential theorist who deployed it as a term of art. The filter, Seymour Chatman argues, might be that “diegetic consciousness which literally perceives and thinks about things from a position within…[a constructed literary] world. Only their ‘perspective’ is immanent to that world. Only they can be filters” (196–97). The theorist’s granular distinction between narrator and “filter” need not detain readers here; the point of greatest interest for the argument at hand is the filter’s ready suggestiveness to thinkers of experimental narration. If the aperture for this argument describes the variously occupied first-person narrator, the filter—and its Tudor expansion—refers to the outer perceptual limits of the first-person form, calling attention above all to its function as a sieve and site of selective apperception.
Nothing, after all, has prepared Streamer for the philter’s effects, its impact on thresholds of sensory awareness. The philter foregrounds the perceiver’s everyday function as a filter, his capacity to screen out as well as channel through seemingly infinite stimuli. As part of the experiment’s last touches, Streamer marinates the ears of various animals and stuffs them into dumplings (“I fried these pillows in good oil olive,” Streamer notes) before holding them to his ears (29). At the close of these elaborate treatments, Streamer pops tablets of cat dung onto his tongue and plunges into another lifeworld:
[T]here was nothing within an hundred mile of me done on any side…but I heard it as well as if I had been by it, and could discern all voices, but by means of noises understand none…. [I heard the] barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, rumbling of rats, gaggling of geese, humming of bees, rousing of bucks, gaggling of ducks,…ringing of pans, crowing of cocks, sewing of socks, cackling of hens, scrabbling of pens,…groaning and spewing, baking and brewing, scratching and rubbing, watching and shrugging…. [I nearly went deaf with all the noise since my ears had been] incomparably amended in receiving and yielding the shrillness of any touching sounds. (31–32)
Creaturely voices vie with one another as once-ambient activity swells through poetry’s insurgence into earsplitting articulation. A marginal note (“here the poetic fury came upon him”) marks off the irruption as rhyme (32). In coming to, this catlike being finds receptive organs attuned to preposterously faint noises: the narrator has attained an insupportable sentience in pursuit of what nonhumans know. Threatened with sensory collapse, the narrator tries to undo rebirth; groping his way inside a fireplace, he smothers his head with pillows. At the very point Streamer enters perception’s outer limits, he finds himself reduced to the domestic margins. Cowering inside the hearth, Streamer for the first time hears animal vocalizations as speech—a now-trapped crow flaps frantically above, cursing him.
When George Eliot listens in Middlemarch for the squirrel’s heartbeat and the “roar which lies on the other side of silence,” her evocative style leads readers to linger over what the novel casts as everyday dullness (189). Baldwin’s newly sensitive narrator forces the claims of the unheard, inducing permeability by cat-echizing Streamer—that is, making the scholar’s ears reverberate (kata, “into” or “thoroughly”; ekhein, “to let resound”) at infrasonic frequencies. Beware the Cat’s first-person narrator again emerges as a filtration device constituted against teeming states of sensory plenitude that await better or worse modes of narrative selection. The primary field or horizon of choice for the poet-as-maker could of course be a set of formal constraints and conventions—the metrical patterns, style or tone, and recurrent tropes or plots that through the entirety of a literary tradition come to distinguish one mode or genre from another. But Baldwin’s handling of the filter sets forth sensory plenitude instead as prose narration’s grounding assumption.
It is no coincidence that shapely plots give way at this literary-historical passage to the force of nearly intolerable sense encounters. For Beware the Cat’s minoritized filters, forms bearing witness to receding or nonexistent legal shelters, the text simulates their sudden exposure—and reduction—to nature’s remainders. Cut loose from ethicopolitical codes that might secure fuller modes of personhood, Beware the Cat’s minoritized filters, among whom one might count Baldwin himself, brace for a disembedding: once-contoured stories disintegrate into random bursts of stimuli, and narrative structures (not least of all those on which a court’s criminal cases are built) splinter into the flux of unwilled sensation.
From Streamer’s sensory breakthrough onward, a kind of interdiegetic turn taking is reaffirmed: the first-person narration passes to Mouse-Slayer. The text, which started by subordinating turn taking to single-person streaming, finally confronts the unbearable simultaneity of all creaturely claims. The relay from human to feline now stages the first person’s encounter with a set of historical claims, rhyming ones that cannot be articulated in full by any single narrator. The first person, again, opens onto nonnormative positions at large. With Mouse-Slayer, the minoritized and therefore slightly unreal (that is, unbelievable) positions of the text’s narrators most obviously mark their distance from a mainstream that might secure and legitimate existence. On the perceptual periphery, Beware the Cat’s first persons do what they must to register their own slightness and a corresponding inability to affirm what passes for truth. They begin, too, to constitute another organizing locus—that first-person stream poised to overrun mainstream channels on the way to a fuller, novelistic reality.
As the philter’s first hit wears off, Streamer peers toward the Aldersgate roof where squalling cats in nights past have kept him up. An assembly of cats has already gathered there, and a lowborn female named Mouse-Slayer prepares her final defense in what readers learn is the last session of a three-night trial. The new narrator’s name calls up those involuntary offenses protected under the law: the “manslayer” of the Geneva Bible is the protected perpetrator of manslaughter, a figure that like Baldwin’s ambivalent conscience is neither wholly culpable nor innocent (Deut. 19.3–4, 6). The narrator’s feline qualities especially affiliate her with an impish conscience, for this hyperaware figure slips around underfoot, perceiving the mischief that eludes bird’s-eye views. Before the court, however, Mouse-Slayer first recounts a difficult pregnancy and the intimate partner violence that made it so. After ingesting a mood-enhancing herb (a feline philter), a former partner shows up demanding sex, forcing Mouse-Slayer when she refuses: “I cried out for help as loud as ever I could squawl, and to defend myself till succor came I scrat and bit as hard as ever I could” (47). Criminal charges are brought against Mouse-Slayer, since as she explains it, “our holy law …forbiddeth us females to refuse any males not exceeding the number of ten in a night….” This same diabolical code, which “forbid[s] any male… to force any [pregnant] female,” will also sustain the appeal through which Mouse-Slayer is likely acquitted (47).
Beware the Cat contends among other things for first-person narration, the mode Henry James memorably described as the “form foredoomed to looseness,” and does so against the law’s third-person terseness (xli). Mouse-Slayer’s story builds, pulling in more and more elements that could be dismissed as irrelevant to the case at hand. This narrator explains, for instance, that she once sought prenatal support from her eventual attacker. He refused to supply food, setting off a medical emergency and near miscarriage. The figure who helps the narrator survive first this domestic crisis and then attempted rape is another female of her species, Isegrim, who now notably presides as a judge’s assistant. Beware the Cat’s detailed account pits the extravagant, seemingly formless wandering of first-person narration against the law’s truncations—that careful provision for a male right to sex, that radio silence on burdens that ensue. Pulled off the confessions of lyric subjectivity, the first-person speaker is still set in Baldwin’s text to ostensibly private matters, yet links a personal case back to codified and entirely predictable, shared origins. “Justices should cherish the innocents accused,” the margin interjects, flagging the text’s concern with enlarging the conscientious purview beyond the most intimate circles (51). Readers will hear its call for the presumption of innocence, yet the text asks, too, after legal arrangements for care apart from the dependencies of sexual relation. (Notice how the first responder to domestic crisis, the unrelated female neighbor, reappears in court as an official representative of justice.) Baldwin’s first person appeals for better protections from an institution whose predatory laws might yet respond to print-house interjections from indeterminate and as-yet-unheard multitudes.
To defend her lifelong commitment to feline codes of conduct, Mouse-Slayer concludes by recounting her skill at making mischief among humans; the cat’s pranks include the opening of a first-person aperture into humanism’s most fashionable literary tropes. The most important scandal to Mouse-Slayer’s name retraces the text’s signature move from philter to filter: the figure of conscience first enables, then interrupts, a secret affair. Beware the Cat sends its first person amid domestic enclosures, creating an alien position from which to reclaim literary sensitivity. While staying at a boarding house that fronted a bawdy house, Mouse-Slayer watched one day as the procurer—frustrated by a young wife’s rejection of a client’s advances—produces a mysterious letter that begins and ends with a curse:
[C]ursed be the unhappy hour…in which I first saw those piercing eyes which…are so blind of all mercy as will rather with rigor consume my life than…[offer] one drop of pity…. [When I die of grief], let those white and tender hands of yours close up those open windows through which the uncomfortable light of your beauty shone first into his heart. If you refuse this to do, I beseech the gods immortal…that either they change that honest stony heart, or else disfigure that fair merciless favor. (43–44)
The letter’s cry—“change that honest stony heart, or else disfigure that fair merciless favor”—gives the prophetic utterance (“I will take the stony heart out of their bodies, and will give them an heart of flesh” [Geneva Bible, Ezek. 11.19]) a menacing twist. As the procurer explains to the resistant wife, when her very own daughter had refused this letter’s love-sick author, she had morphed into a cat. To drive home the deception, the house cat once known as Mouse-Slayer has been made accessory to the plot: in one of those kitchen experiments Baldwin relishes, the cat has been plied with irritants, and now sits by crying and sneezing as if she were that penitent daughter.
But Baldwin’s young woman is no fool, and the suitor and his procurer only accomplish their plot with the combined weight of ancient and modern literary authority behind them. The letter draws on tropes in vogue from the Petrarchan sonnets (the ruinous fire of the beloved’s eyes, the poet’s exquisite pain) as well as transformations more familiarly known from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The Latin poet had long warned readers of unrequited desire’s disfiguring force. With this tacit knowledge, the older procurer frames the intrigue as conscientious obligation: fidelity in marriage is fine, she insists. Yet “rather than any other should die for our sakes, we should not make any conscience to save [suitors’] lives” (45). The narrative filter redirects readers’ responses: Mouse-Slayer’s continuous presence—and her earlier account of close calls—point away from unrequited desire as the paradigmatic instance for defining conscientious care. Beware the Cat sets out to reclaim a mode of sensitive knowledge. The links afforded by first-person narration amass largely unwritten experiences against a growing body of lyric verse.Footnote 19 Routing conventions through its first-person form, this conscient center offers a countervailing account of somatic reactivity and its conscription into affective-cum-ethical pathways.
Far from seeking release from creaturely form, this roving intelligence slips across sociocultural domains and into leading modes of literary discourse. When the procurer’s letter does its work, melting its mark into the lover’s susceptibility, the young wife begins an affair with the gentleman suitor; she likes Mouse-Slayer enough to take her home, too. The narrator is on hand, then, to witness their spendy trysts. The merchant’s wife plies her gentleman with delicacies until they burn through most of her household means. For breakfast one morning, the lovers indulge in “capons, hot venison, marrow bones” before getting back in bed (50). The refinement of the wife’s taste to consistently richer fare is part of the seduction; unlike in earlier cases, however, these philters do not yield the shareable knowledge of prose. The two are, to say the least, unprepared when the third leg of their love triangle walks in—the husband represented elsewhere as busy with a “great trade of merchandise” (50). The merchant’s absences are tied, in other words, to freight-laden ships, making his return reminiscent of another homecoming.
I am thinking, of course, of the renowned return of the Homeric seafarer to his suitor-beset wife. Penelope waits out Odysseus’s prolonged absence behind a piece of cloth, as readers will recall, refusing remarriage until her work on the loom is done. She undoes by night what she weaves by day. So too does Beware the Cat produce a concealing textile. On hearing the merchant approach, its gentleman jumps from bed “into a corner behind the painted cloth” (50). This time, however, the merchant is in no rush to leave. The talebearer, or rather news courier, seizes the opportunity for nonverbal communication. Disregarding the wife’s frantic signals, the cat heads behind the tapestry to start the fight of her life:
[S]eeing that scratching could not move [the hidden lover], suddenly I leaped up and caught him by the genitals with my teeth, and bote [sic] so hard that, when he had restrained more than I thought any man could, at last he cried out, and caught me by the neck thinking to strangle me. My master…hearing such a rat as was not wont to be about such walls, came to the cloth and lift it up, and there found this bare-arst gentleman strangling me who had his stones in my mouth. (50–51)
The narrator cuts off guesses about the outcome: “How they agreed among them I cannot tell,” Mouse-Slayer explains as she runs off for good (51). Readers, as Laurie Shannon notes, are left looking at unexpectedly mirrored figures (211): the cat, like the lover with whom she’s caught in flagrante delicto, is apparently shamefaced, unwilling to be discovered on the grounds again.
A creature as physically nondescript as she is voluble, Baldwin’s guilty form morphs from corrector to house cat and back, a conscient center to be variously inhabited. This first person is an agent of publication whose ethical authority rests not in the virtues of an individualist character but in a hostility to practices that predicate knowledge, carnal or otherwise, on the maintenance of secrecy. Once again, the Baldwinian narrator channels literature from existing conventions toward a first-person filter, a medium constituted against a sensory plenitude to which it can barely do justice. Far from a paragon of searing moral vision, Baldwin’s creaturely medium staves off strangulation from sensory plenitude on one side—and the philter’s twin forces of the sentimental and sensual on the other. It ultimately wrests breathing room from irresistible (that is, alternately seductive and coercive) forces for another kind of sentient center: a sensitive conscience and its publication-ready, first-person prose narration. Beware the Cat’s minoritized being—so acutely aware, news-obsessed, and ready to review legal as well as literary codes—takes up residence in the form of the first person. Its longer-term, plural progeny may well include Martin Marprelate, the English Civil War’s Margery Marprelate press (Como), and Defoe’s featureless, journal-writing H. F. This newsy, novelistic filter formed by Baldwin’s printing press belongs alongside the lyric subjectivity of Renaissance sonnets, Michel de Montaigne’s essayistic I, and the Spanish picaro as one of early modern literature’s defining first-person modes.
