A Case for Credit: Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll and Testament” and the Mock Testament Tradition
Ingram, Jill P.
Early Modern Culture, No. 5 (2006)
Abstract
The speaker in Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll and Testament” (1573) leaves to the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem “many” people who talk “out of tune”: her mock-testament provides London’s asylum with the insane who are already patients there.2 The paradox is double: her bequest fills, with a bounty of sickness and insanity, a hospital already full; and the lunatics are not hers to give. Thus she bestows an impossible, impractical gift to a recipient — Bedlam — that in turn is implicated through her satiric offering. This formula, endemic to the mock testament, highlights the testator’s oppositional relationship to the recipient or, as in this case, to the cultural formations responsible for the recipient’s continued “success”: a fully occupied and thus “successful” hospital reflects upon the society that produces its mad inhabitants. But whether Bedlam was “oft” the speaker’s “walke” because she was one of the Londoners who visited it to watch the ravings of the mad for amusement, or because she skirted the fringes of insanity herself, the condition of madness is nonetheless highlighted. And the bequest, offering hoards of mentally ill, provides not just for a more crowded hospital, but also for instability and noise, an “out of tune” cacophony to jangle London’s already noisy streets. These lines attest to Whitney’s own antic mode — and to her deliberate employment of the mock testament genre — in a poem that has often been placed in the female legacy tradition.3 But those poems authorize mothers’ dying bequests to their children, offering advice in the guise of last wills. Whitney’s poem is itself “out of tune” with that genre, and instead, in the speaker’s rollicking and outlandish bequests of the indebted, the insane, the indigent and the widowed, needs to be placed firmly within its proper genre, the mock testament. A satiric literary will that exposed vices and burlesqued legal authority, the mock testament, traceable to the twelfth century, was a well-known genre by Whitney’s time. With a glimpse into the workings of that genre, we can better understand Whitney’s strategies in critiquing aspects of London’s marketplace. Certain mock testament conventions, including the “outsider” status of the dead or dying and often impoverished speaker, and the shattering of social stratification, serve Whitney’s primary goals: she is both dramatizing the ambitious female writer’s plight as an “outsider,” and calling for the opening of credit networks to the city’s marginalized figures.
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