SOURCE: Maslen, Robert. “‘The Cat Got Your Tongue’: Pseudo-Translation, Conversion, and Control in William Baldwin's Beware the Cat.” Translation and Literature 8, no. 1 (1999): 3-27.

In the following essay, Maslen claims that Beware the Cat comments on the state of printing and translation during Edwardian rule just before the accession of Mary I and is a sophisticated celebration of the powers of the new information technology.

William Baldwin's clever little fable Beware the Cat—a piece of prose fiction written in 1553, published in 1570, and christened by its recent editors ‘The First English Novel’—records what is undoubtedly the most astonishing feat of translation of the sixteenth century.¹ In it a priest called Gregory Streamer reveals to a select group of admirers the results of his experiments in translating the languages of the animals, a feat which he claims to have accomplished with the aid of mind-altering drugs and a fortunate...