‘Am I black enough, think you, dressed up in a lasting suit of ink?’
Résumé
In Microcynicon, his earliest foray into satirical writing, Thomas Middleton initiated a conceit built on the blackness of ink, borrowed from Marston and Hall, equally developed in several others of his early works, including The Wisdom of Solomon, The Black Book and The Ghost of Lucrece. Ink, due to its liquid quality and opacity, can readily be assimilated to bile, to blood and to tears, organic fluids that ooze from the body and reveal or betray its more or less unsavoury truths. Being an artefact, ink is also a self-referential vehicle to convey the power of the written word – or at least the power the writer attempts to invest it with. This article attempts to trace the way in which the effects and properties of Middleton’s ink are symbolically related to its components - gall and sulphuric acid on the one hand, soot and gum on the other.
Ink has a shifting status as an object, since using it requires a container (an inkwell or an inkpot), and a pen. The manifold variations of the polysemic pen have perhaps relegated the liquid into which it is dipped to the background by other authors, but Middleton, ever alert to texture and to physicality, fully integrates the liquid and its ability to stain, to dye, to blot in the complex web of imagery woven in his plays as well as his non-dramatic writings.
This paper examines the materiality and significance of ink and its properties in Middleton’s early works and suggests ways in which these resonate in some of his later plays.
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