This perception of the music of the spheres leads to an imaginative passage in which Streamer becomes aware of the sounds of everything happening in a hundred-mile radius: which are named noises, sounded so shrill in my head, by reverbrations of my final filmes, that the sound of them altogether was so disordered and monstrous that I could discern no one from other, save only the harmony of the moving of the spheres which noise excelled all others as much both in pleasance and shril bigness of sound as the zodiac itself surmounteth all other creatures in altitude of place, for in comparison of the basest of this noise, which is the moving of Saturn by means of this huge compass, the highest whistling of the wind, or any other organ pipes (whose sounds I heard issued together,) appeared but a low base, and yet was those an high treble to the voice of beasts which as a mean the running of rivers was a tenor, and the boyling of the sea, and the catracts or gulf therof a goodly base, and the rushing, rising, and falling of the clouds a deep diapson. I put into my two nostrills two troisiques, and into my mouth two losenges, one above my tounge, the other under, and put off my left hose because of Jupiters appropinquosion, and laid the fox tail under my foot and to hear the better I took off my pillows, which stopped my ears, and then listened and viewed as attentively as I could but I warrant you the pellicils or filmy vein that lieth within the bottom of mine ear hole, from whence like veins carry the sound to the senses, was with this medicine in my pillows so purged and parched, or at least dried, that the least moving of the air, whether struck with breath or with living creatures, which we call voyces, or with the moving of dead, as winds, waters, trees, carts, falling of stones, &c. He also believes he can hear a cat calling out someone’s name so, later, the dosage is upped. Despite streams of snot coming from his nose ‘as I never saw before, nor thought that any such had been in mans body’, Streamer finds he can recollect in detail everything he’s experienced over the past twenty years.
He goes to great lengths to capture different animals around London (St John’s Wood is mentioned as a hunting ground), and combine bits of them to make magic pills and potions. Streamer hears tales from Ireland about talking cats and becomes obsessed with the idea of being able to decipher the secret speech of animals. Streamer is a bit daft and naive, like Swift’s Lemuel Gulliver, and Baldwin has some fun making him stumble over complicated-sounding words in the spirit of ‘I won’t have you casting nasturtiums about me’. The novel has a complex structure consisting of three interlinked stories which are related by one Master Streamer. (You’ll need a subscription to JSTOR to read the whole article, but the first page is open to all.) This scholarly article from 1979 claims that Beware the Cat is the first substantial and original work of prose in the English language, and therefore the first novel. 19 November 2012 Beware the Cat: auditory overload in the 16th centuryīEWARE THE CAT is a short novel written in 1552 by William Baldwin, a poet and printer’s assistant who lived in London.
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