SOURCE: Ringler, William A., Jr., and Michael Flachmann. Introduction to Beware the Cat by William Baldwin: The First English Novel, pp. xiii-xxviii. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1988.

In the following essay, Ringler and Flachmann provide background on the rise of fictional prose narrative and the career of Baldwin before discussing the narrative art of Beware the Cat, which the critics contend is one of the best productions of sixteenth-century European fiction.

The long fictional narrative in prose, what is now called the “novel,” has been the dominant literary form in the west since the eighteenth century, although it was the latest to be developed in most literatures of the world. To study the art of narrative in earlier times, we must examine works composed in verse—especially the epic and the romance—because the history of earlier literatures confirms that the more highly organized rhythms of verse invariably...