Isabella Whitney was the first woman in England to publish a volume of poetry. She published not one but two: The Copy of a Letter, Lately Written in meeter, by a younge Gentilwoman to her unconstant Lover (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay or Pleasant Posy (1573). Whitney seems to have been a member of the minor gentry; we believe we know the family to whom she was born; she spent some years "in service" in a London household. Her precise class position and thus the nature of the service she is likely to have performed are difficult to ascertain: she would not have been a charwoman, but neither would she have qualified as an all-but-equal companion to aristocrats, like Maria in Twelfth Night or Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice. She seems to have known the nature of real domestic chores: her writings display familiarity with the boisterous commercial and material life of sixteenth-century London, the noise and stench of the streets, the haggling with butchers, apothecaries, and pawnbrokers, the harried contracting of petty loans, the everyday business of getting and spending. Whitney lost her employment in the early 1570s, or so we conclude from her published work, and was forced to leave London for lack of means.
Upon her departure, she wrote a 364-line poem in which she bids farewell to the city and makes a series of mock bequests. Thus begins "The Manner of Her Will & What She Left to London, and to All Those in It, at Her Departing":
I Whole in body, and in minde,
but very weake in Purse:
Doo make, and writ my Testament
for fear it wyll be worse.
Much in the manner of François Villon, Whitney construes her departure from the city as a kind of social death and builds her poem upon the rhetoric and method of a Last Will and Testament. In Whitney's era, as in Villon's a century earlier, the Last Will was a document of both legal and religious force. Villon, despite the mock liberality with which he disposes of worldly goods in his famous "Testament," grants considerable space to that which we recognize as belonging to the soul: he tempers lyric satire with extended meditations on mortality, lost love, lost chances, and regret. Whitney's tonal and sentimental range is considerably different, more like that of Villon in his shorter "Legacy." Whitney dispenses with the soul rather briskly, for instance. And once she has dispensed with it, she doesn't look back: the conceptual and rhetorical leverage that interests her is that which she can achieve by working entirely within her principal conceit:
I first of all to London leave
because I there was bred:
Brave buildyngs rare, of Churches store,
and Pauls to the head.
As conspicuous as the conceit itself is the punning and tautological spirit in which it is deployed. The speaker is leaving London because she is no longer able to support herself there; she leaves to the city that which she must leave behind, that which is not, in the usual sense, hers to give, that which the city owns already or keeps in circulation, that which makes the city what it is.