First-Person Prose Narration and William Baldwin’s <i>Beware the Cat</i> (ca. 1553)

Abstract Narratives about the rise of English prose fiction will remain incomplete if not incoherent without recognition of a historical breakthrough: first-person prose narration represents a deliberate innovation of Tudor prose fiction. One cannot simply run the I voice together with accounts about the eighteenth-century rise of individualism. When William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (ca. 1553)—a text well known among Shakespeare’s contemporaries—introduces three first-person narrators into Tudor fiction, it does so as a marked turn away from third-person conventions. Baldwin’s work effectively contends for first-person structures in the face of a succession crisis and broader ethicopolitical uncertainty. Formal inventiveness thus meets a set of pressing historical needs: first-person narration functions, in Baldwin’s novel as elsewhere, as a formal device—an aperture and filter—fitted to minoritized and marginalized points of view.