ABSTRACT
In the slippery satirical fiction, Beware the Cat (composed c. 1553, first published 1570), a debate over literary decorum-specifically, whether one should present talking animals as characters in court entertainments-provokes Gregory Streamer to defend the notion that animals possess reason and speech.1 Streamer’s arguments (which include a description of his magical eavesdropping upon an assembly of cats) are themselves an indecorous mixture of literary kinds and competing utterances. This is not really surprising since William Baldwin, their supposed transcriber, has already signaled a playful interest in conflating different forms of discourse. In his Epistle Dedicatory, Baldwin asserts his book will make Streamer’s friends “think they hear Master Streamer speak, and he himself in the like action shall doubt whether he speaketh or readeth” (3). From its inception, Beware the Cat is a text where orality and literacy (or voice and print) are mutually entangled and this blurring of media is reemphasized when Baldwin describes his editorial practice: “I have divided [Streamer’s] oration into three parts and set the argument before them and an instruction after them, with such notes as might be gathered thereof, so making it booklike” (3). An impromptu oration, a spoken attempt to persuade, has been furnished with the textual machinery that will transform it into a material object, a scholarly work.2
