The word 'inky' occurs only in rhetorical contexts that one might call 'inky.' Rosalind/Ganymede tries to tell the love-struck Phoebe in rather high-flown language that she is not for her:
46 'Tis not your inky brows, your black silk hair,
47 Your bugle eyeballs, nor your cheek of cream
48 That can entame my spirits to your worship.
(AYL 3.5.46-48)
This is unmistakably echoed and amplified in the even more high-flown language of Hamlet's response to his mother's criticism of his excessive grief:
77 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, [good] mother,
78 Nor customary suits of solemn black,
79 Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
80 No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
81 Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
(Ham.1.2.77-81)
The only other occurrence of 'inky', in Gaunt's death speech, does not fit this syntactic and rhythmic pattern:
61 England, bound in with the triumphant sea,
62 Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
63 Of wat'ry Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
64 With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds;
65 That England, that was wont to conquer others,
66 Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
67 Ah, would the scandal vanish with my life,
68 How happy then were my ensuing death!
(Ri2 2.1.61-68)
But Gaunt's death speech is rhetorically anything but gaunt. Shakespeare's consciousness of Gaunt's rhetorical excesses is marked by the fact that he turns Gaunt's death into a linguistic event. When Richard inquires "What says he?" Northumberland replies:
Nay, nothing, all is said.
149 His tongue is now a stringless instrument,
150 Words, life, and all, old Lancaster has spent.
(Ri2 2.1.148-150)
It appears then that 'inky' in all its occurrences carries a surface meaning of 'black' but invokes and dramatizes the dangers of rhetorical excess.
16 September 1999