Truth, Lies, and Fiction in William Baldwin's Wonderful News of the Death of Paul III

William Baldwin's Wonderful News of the Death of Paul III (c. 1552) has received little attention from the critics, but it can be argued that it occupies a central role in his literary career, negotiating the transition from his early works of compilation and translation in the late 1540s to his acheivements in original prose fiction in the mid-1550s. This essay argues that this "turn to fiction" may have been stimulated by the moral and aesthetic problems posed by the task in hand: the Englishing of the grotesquely imaginative anti-papal satire, Epistola de morte Pauli tertii (1549). Baldwin recognized that this piece of Protestant propaganda mixed in scandalous rumour-much of it probably lies-with historically verifiable truth about the life of pope Paul III; and this presented him with a problem that preoccupied him in his later and better known works such as Beware the Cat (ms. 1553).