May 2000

     Since Betty Travitsky's 1980 introduction to "The 'Wyll and Testament' of Isabella Whitney," the lines above have indicated Whitney's "optimism, strength of purpose, and zest," and the poet "herself as fairly young, as single, and consequently as devoted to a life of writing" (79). While such an impression provocatively marks Whitney a proto-feminist single girl, pursuing an exciting bohemian life through verse, Travitsky never presents the lines preceding these in Whitney's poem, which present a different, and decidedly less deviant, tone: "Good sister so I you commend/ To him that made us all,/ I know you housewifery intend,/ Though I to writing fall" (287). Considering herself a fallen creature for writing verse, and engaging her younger sister to continue her intended occupation, Whitney stridently upholds contemporary patriarchal opinion concerning the proper end of women's education, and intimates not a little regret in the circumstances of her writing life. Re-reading the selection above through such a frame, Whitney's tone sounds more regretful. Beginning the stanza with "Had," a word that negotiates its connotation between a past sense of having and a projected condition, a word that invokes the presence of something absent, prepares the reader for an almost wistful account of Whitney's lack, her inability to be roused, or active, and thus relegated to "applying" her pen, a far less enviable, occupationally-inflected, way of describing her creative life. As she was writing in hopes of a commission, such a reading is in no way contrary to Whitney's experience, and yet Travitsky's analysis of Whitney's work refuses to take seriously her socio-economic concerns. Calling the later "Will and Testament" a humorous "celebration of the common man," (82) Travitsky extends her reading thus:

     But if Isabella Whitney was distressed by her occasional ill fortune, the last and greatest portion of the volume, a Nashean last will and testament to the city of London, shows that she was remarkably capable of regaining her composure and courage, and of facing life with renewed energy. (81)

     This characterization of Whitney's bountiful spirit has been subsequently translated in the poem as the speaker's desire to equitably disperse socio-economic property and offer comfort and sustenance to the disenfranchised. I will argue that the dominant critical position on Isabella Whitney's "Will and Testament", as inherited from Travitsky's initial impressions, manages to leave unexplored the tension between a proto-socialist desire to spread the wealth and a resigned acknowledgement and perpetuation of the status quo, derived from Whitney's own internalization of her "fallen" status as a poet.

      As Wendy Wall has indicated, the will is a peculiar genre for Renaissance women. Legacy prose "is a strangely performative and self-constituting gesture dependent upon the erasure of the subject….written in the present tense, imagined as being enacted in the future and authorized by a past voice…[both] strangely present and absent" (38). Despite the imaginative fissures that identity engages as it wills itself in print, in law the practice was far more conventional. Women were "allowed" to write a legally binding will only if single; married women often constituted their legacies in an instructive letter to their unborn child upon the event of their death in childbirth. Wills in this latter sense surrogate maternal instruction; in the absence of a living parent, the document parents for them. Though not legally binding in any way, such letters gained authority through their publication, usually undertaken by mourning relatives; the inherent publicity of the mourning process allowed the volume, considered spiritually educational, to be published for a broader audience. Volumes such as Prayers made by the right honorable Lady Francis Aburgavennie, and committed at the hour of her death to her only daughter (1582) and The honour of vertue. Or the monument erected to the immortall memory of Mrs. Elizabeth Crashawe Who dyed in childbirth (1620) indicate the prevalence of this kind of publication. Isabella Whitney's "Will and Testament," situating itself within such a bifurcated genre, finds itself almost immediately in tension with the requisite conditions of both strands. Being neither pregnant, married, nor dead, she cannot draft a moralistic document, or find anyone to give it to, and though her status as a single woman allows her the opportunity to bequeath certain possessions, she has none. Bridging the gap between Whitney's entry into the genre and her utter inappropriateness for it is the theory that Whitney's real intention is social reform. Ann Rosalind Jones, taking a cue from Travitsky's assertion that Whitney's poem celebrates the "common man," notes that urban life allowed her to "imagine a freer, more playful relationship to a polis" (156). She continues:

Whitney figures herself as a creative redistributor of goods, the architect of fairer and more symmetrical exchanges of labor, commodities, and cash than the city historically offered. As poet, she reconstructs herself from a pauper into a populist Lady Bountiful with the verbal power, at least, to build a city more hospitable to disempowered groups: the young, the poor, the second sex. (157)

But reading from the view that Whitney considered hers a "fall" into poetry allows us to reconstitute the power of her poetic voice. It is difficult, after all, to see a Lady Bountiful opening her poem as Whitney does. Departing from the city is couched as a lover's complaint:

The time is come I must depart
from thee, ah famous city.
I never yet, to rue my smart,
did find that thou hadst pity.

Wherefore small cause there is that I
should grieve from thee to go.

But many women foolishly,
like me, and other mo'e,
Do such affixed fancy set
on those which least deserve,
That long it is ere wit we get,
away from them to swerve. (289)

"Yet I am in no angry mood," she writes, and begins a catalogue of items, people, behaviors, and attitudes that she wills to London. Were her properties rationed equally, or to London as a whole, the process could very easily be seen as redemptive or rehabilitative, but just as Whitney recognizes the inventory of items she wishes to bequeath, so she designates particular individuals to receive them. Asking at the outset that "you all" bear witness to the composition and direction of her will, and to the "steadfast brain" she uses to compile it (an indicator of poetic creativity as well as sanity), Whitney seeks approval and resignation from her inheritors, which makes the following stanzas all the more striking.

      The next twenty lines bequeath buildings, people, money and food to London, and the people who comprise it. If there are any Lady Bountiful stanzas to be had, Whitney comes closest to articulating equal distribution here. But in lines 81-82, "those which are of calling such/ that costlier they require," receive silk "as any would desire," (292) abruptly dividing rich from poor. Of this shift, Jones writes, "Typically, she uses the plural 'you' to address the entire urban population; even when she appears to accept class distinctions, she invokes consumer desires shared by townspeople of all ranks" (159). If this is the case, then two lines later when she leaves jewels "for ladies meet," the intention should be equally broad, and yet, the following lines continue to address a wealthy audience, providing silver-plated dishes and the trappings of an aristocrat. Leaving "tailors" to the women and "bodymakers" to the men implies a further breach between the genders, and as the poem continues this bifurcation is split into the sick and the well, "ruffians" and "quiet men," and apprentices and prostitutes, just to mention a few. By asserting that each of these archetypes witness and attest to her "steadfast brain," legalizing through their presence the validity of a document her absence will legitimate, Whitney asks these inheritors to not only accept the gifts she bequeaths, but the demographic determining them. She asks that they identify with an archetype and settle for its rationed portion. Any notion that she empowers them in this way, to designate their own share by identifying with their own archetype, is trumped by one of many reminders to "see that none you do deceive/ of that I leave them till" (290).

      This seemingly endless catalogue of items and inheritors becomes even more overtly fragmented at lines 170 and following, where Whitney summarizes her progress throughout the poem and shifts into a new mode:

Now for the people in thee left,
I have done as I may,
And that the poor, when I am gone,
have cause for me to pray,
I will to prisons portions leave,
what though but very small,
Yet that they may remember me
occasion be it shall. (296)

     To have a population "left" over from the previous catalogue, which Travitsky and Jones have considered inclusive and symmetrical, is to acknowledge the very same acceptance of class distinctions that they insist Whitney ignores. In fact, Whitney uses the poor as a specific demographic group in order to posit the first of her will's intentions, "that they remember me" (296) and the first representation of her own body in the poem, associating her circumstances with theirs. Immediately following the lines excerpted above, Whitney shifts her focus to the city's prisons, leaving debtors the Counter, supplied with officers to separate honest men from thieves, leaving frequent trials at Newgate to prevent overcrowding and infection, and leaving a nag to end the "sorrows" of a death-row prisoner, to break his neck or ride off with him at the gallows. That honest men would be in the Counter, overcrowding and infection plague Newgate, and prisoners would rather die than resume the sorrows of a death sentence overtly critiques the country's penal institutions but offers no absolution for those within them. Rather, the section provides Whitney with an opportunity to reference her own financial straits. Addressing her readers, for the first time characterized as a smiling and laughing group of "standers-by" (a not altogether sympathetic portrait), Whitney interprets that we laugh because she's bequeathed nothing to Ludgate:

I am not now in case to lie,
here is no place of jest:
I did reserve that for myself,
if I my health possessed

And ever came in credit so
a debtor for to be,
When days of payment did approach,

I thither meant to flee,
To shroud myself among the rest
that choose to die in debt

Rather than any creditor
should money from them get. (298)

     Projecting herself into the poem in this section and in this way produces a double negation of her identity; she is now strikingly absent from the first, aristocratic half of the work, and in the second, though she would be at Ludgate, she is not: "Yet 'cause I feel myself so weak/ that none me credit dare,/ I here revoke, and do it leave/ some bankrupts to his share" (298). Moving immediately from those lines into her bookbinder inheritors, "because I like their art" (300), consequently associates her with the art itself, positing a connection between her absent body in Ludgate and her books in the stalls. She specifically leaves friends to shop her printer's bookstore, and this kind of detailed, intimate construction of her reading public, suggests the existent surrogacy of the document, similar to that of an absent mother's will.

      From this point forward, the text largely references Whitney's own life and experiences; whereas the first half of the poem intimated her presence as that of a servant walking the streets and cataloguing all found there with the diligence of a desirous window-shopper, the stanzas following her Ludgate introduction and the first real portrait of her readers initiate an experiential series of concerns. She leaves "maidens poor" like herself, rich widowers to marry them, and "young gentlemen" rich widows to similar ends. Since "my parents there did dwell," she leaves horses and oxen to Smithfield, and mad patients at Bedlam, "for that was oft my walk" (299). For a crowd of young gentlemen she leaves books in bookstalls, and within the books "part of all that London hath to furnish them," (300) a reference to her own poetry, and by extension, her inspiration for writing, in effect, her mind.

      As these arts close her catalogue, she moves directly into a lengthy process of leave-taking, a verbal deathbed scene in which she repeats prayers to God to take her from "this vale so vile" and begs her readers to bury her: "And though I nothing namèd have/ to bury me withal,/ Consider that above the ground/ annoyance be I shall/ And let me have a shrouding sheet/ to cover me from shame, /And in oblivion bury me/ and never more me name" (301). Despite her requests that the poor "remember" her, she longs for a defacing anonymity in these lines, constructing a lineage from archetypes that, like her, remain anonymous and fragmented. Contrary to her initial depiction of London as an unfaithful lover, here she addresses it as a responsible husband, "I made thee sole executor, because/ I loved thee best./ And thee I put in trust to give/ the goods unto the rest" (301), and assigns "Good Fortune," and her servants, "happy days and quiet times" to assist, producing a family to aid him. In these lines much of Whitney's earlier assertions, regarding her position to the city, her desires for an immortalizing document, her need to leave the citizens something to remember her by, and a universal call for witnessing and acceptance of her "steadfast brain" and the demographically-calculated dispersal of her "possessions," are upturned. Longing for forgiveness, anonymity, and so desperate for a husband-lover that she would engage London's pitiless help in this, her most pitiful request, Whitney's subject position is intensely deflated. "Thus being weak and weary both,/ an end here I will make," she writes, and, some ten lines later, "So fare thou well a thousand times," and twenty lines later, "So finally I make an end,/ no longer can I tarry"(301-02) and thus, at last, ends the poem. The self-defacement in the repeated cries of farewell are prevented from parody by grave inter-stanzas that address her meditations on religion, the afterlife, and her legacy.

      So what to make of the Lady Bountiful? Wendy Wall's incisive analysis of the fragmented identity inherent in the will genre produces a way of reading Whitney's incoherent subject position. If a will's legitimacy is predicated on the erasure of its subject, a fictionalized will offers a second remove, a second deferral. Whitney reasserts herself in the poem by affiliating with the poor, specifically debtors, specifically debtors whose parents lived in Smithfield, specifically debtors who passed Bedlam every day on their walk to and from work, debtors who can enumerate elements on that walk's topos from the point of view of one who has never owned much and wouldn't know how. She is characterized as one who is more comfortable leaving the classes separated and merely easing their lives from within that separation than reconstituting a society without it. The abstracted anonymity of a Lady Bountiful subsumes these details by ignoring the tension they produce between Whitney's experiential reality and the genre she employs to express it. Positing her writing life against that of her sister's housewifery in "To Her Sister Misteris A.B.," Whitney sees writing as a fallen public activity, contrary to the feminine domesticity of the married life. Not having that husband, longing for the domestic life, turning London into a faithful spouse in the "Will and Testament," Whitney is attempting to negotiate a creative space between the public and the private that allows her to write a maternal, quasi-moral "letter" to her survivors, and yet do so without being a mother, a wife, or even remotely ill. She can make it public and "acceptable" by being a single woman retaining legal status, and considering the poem itself the final "property" she has to leave.

Fehrenbach, R.J. "Isabella Whitney, Sir Hugh Plat, Geoffrey Whitney, and "Sister Eldershae." ELN 21 (1983): 7-11.

Jones, Ann Rosalind. "Apostrophes to Cities: Urban Rhetorics in Isabella Whitney and Moderata Fonte." Attending to Early Modern Women. Ed. Susan D. Amussen and Adele Seef. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998. 155-175.

Panofsky, Richard J. "Introduction." The Floures of Philosophie and A Sweet Nosegay and The Copy of a Letter. Ed. Richard J. Panofsky. Delmar: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1982. v-xxi.

Phillippy, Patricia. "The Maid's Lawful Liberty: Service, the Household, and 'Mother B' inIsabella Whitney's A Sweet . Modern Philology 95.4 (1998): 439-62.

Travitsky, Betty. "The 'Wyll and Testament' of Isabella Whitney." ELR 10 (1980): 76-94.

Wall, Wendy. "Isabella Whitney and the Female Legacy." ELH 58 (1991): 35-62.

Whitney, Isabella. "To Her Sister Misteris A.B." Women Writers in Renaissance England.

Ed. Randall Martin. New York: Longman, 1997. 286-289.

Whitney, Isabella. "The Manner of Her Will, and What She Left to London." Women Writers in Renaissance England. Ed. Randall Martin. New York: Longman, 1997. 289-302.