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[I] ‘did write this Wyll with my own hand’
Simulation and Dissimulation in Isabella Whitney’s ‘Wyll and Testament’
in Critical Survey
Author:
Vassiliki Markidou
Vassiliki Markidou
Faculty of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece vmarkidou@enl.uoa.gr
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Abstract
This article attempts for the first time to shed light on the politics of simulation and dissimulation in Isabella Whitney's ‘Wyll and Testament’. It also argues that the poem both reflects its creator's awareness of the celebrated English historical and topographical narratives and deviates from them by crucially omitting a seminal part of London's history, namely its Troynovant tradition. In so doing, as well as by defining a paradoxical urban landscape, Whitney presents a tale not of the (mythic) founding of the English capital with its patriarchal and nation-building connotations, but of its (satiric) bequeathal by benevolent femininity, as such offering its reader a different angle from which to explore and interpret early modern London.
Contributor Notes
Vassiliki Markidou is Assistant Professor in English Literature and Culture at the Faculty of English Language and Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has published a number of articles on representations of early modern religious, national and cultural identity, with particular reference to the Ottomans, spatial and temporal palimpsests, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women's writing. She has co-edited Precarious Identities: Studies in the Work of Fulke Greville and Robert Southwell (Routledge Studies in Renaissance and Early Modern Worlds of Knowledge, 2020), Shakespeare and Greece (The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury, 2017) and the second volume of the anglophone electronic journal of comparative literary studies Synthesis, titled Configurations of Cultural Amnesia (2010). Email: vmarkidou@enl.uoa.gr