ABSTRACT

This chapter explores Beware the Cat's voice/print conflation and its representations of jostling utterances with an eye to the tension between two distinct "oralities." To be sure, the bawd's oratorical skill brings to mind the early modern habit of associating verbal "incontinency" in women with sexual incontinency. Beware the Cat's proliferation of fictions is officially legitimated by William Baldwin's didactic agendas, but these fictions' tendency to be excessive to and even to contradict their edifying purpose is emphasized by the dilation of one particular portion of Mouse-slayer's autobiography. As far as the "higher orality" is concerned, Baldwin's rendition of Streamer's discourse offers a very striking representation of someone mishandling and fumbling the protocols of oratory. Far from offering a recontainment or tidy moralization of the voices of the work, however, the Exhortation engenders a further disruption of authoritative utterance and produces one last elision of oral and textual discourse.