SOURCE: Gutierrez, Nancy C. “Beware the Cat: Mimesis in a Skin of Oratory.” Style 23, no. 1 (spring 1989): 49-69.

In the following excerpt, Gutierrez asserts that Beware the Cat articulates the humanist theory that a text is not just a product of its author but an experience of reading that serves to create a more moral reader.

In a ballad entitled “A shorte Answere to the boke called: Beware the Cat” (pub c. 1570), the anonymous poet derides William Baldwin's piece of short fiction, published in 1570, as a misrepresentation of the truth: “Every thing almost: in that boke is as tru / As that at midsomer” (Holden 94). The poet's confident and condescending exposé of Baldwin's apparent chicanery loses its bite, however, when one realizes that Beware the Cat is a rhetorical tour de force which depends on the reader's ability to grasp not only the fictive nature of the contents, but also...