Folio 2 / 4
Pisani Dossi 35b (no Getty text)
The counter the prose does not have
A single plate, in a single witness: the counter to the Master's elbow-turn of [Dagger-Sword 4]. The Getty numbering passes straight from [4] to the wagers, so in the prose family this whole family of plays stands without a stated counter.
[5] Counter to the turn
Pisani Dossi · 35b-a
Illustration: Pisani Dossi 35b-a · Text: Pisani Dossi 35b-a
Pisani Dossi · verse translation
So that you may not strike me in the back,
I make this counter well, without difficulty.
Flow of actions
- The Master has turned you by the elbow and is about to strike your back ([Dagger-Sword 4]).
- Make this counter, which prevents that — "well, without difficulty".
- That is the entire text. The couplet names the danger it answers and the ease of answering it, and nothing else: no hand, no foot, no hold, no lock.
- What the counter actually is, only the plate says, and no prose witness exists to unpack it.
The section's one counter, and only the verse family has it — an exact reversal of the usual division, in which the prose owns the counters and the verse owns the boast.
Note
This counter (contrario) to the turn of [4] exists only in the Pisani Dossi; the Getty numbering passes from [4] directly to the wagers.
Glossological analysis
- contrario ([5]) — counter, the third term of the attack → remedy → counter unit (Glossary). What it answers is clear from the couplet — the turn and the strike to the back of [Dagger-Sword 4] — and nothing else about it is.
- schena ([5]) — the back (the spine). The word ties this couplet to the last line of [4]'s ("with the dagger I would strike him in the back"): the verse builds the two plates as a pair on the same word, remedy and counter answering across a page-turn.
- sença pena ([5]) — "without difficulty" — literally without pain or penalty. A claim of cost, not of mechanism: the verse's characteristic way of recommending a play.
- The absent vocabulary is the finding. This plate names no guard, no step, no hold, no lock, no target beyond the back — the technical apparatus that fills every neighbouring page is simply not here. Where the Getty is missing, so is the terminology; the couplets carry pictures and claims, and the prose carries the art's language.
Manuscript comparison
- Coverage: the Pisani Dossi alone. The Getty jumps from [4] to [6]; the Morgan, present for [1]–[4], also lacks it; the Paris does not have it. This is one half of a symmetrical gap — the Getty lacks [5] and the Pisani Dossi lacks [9], so each of the two fullest witnesses is missing exactly one of the section's ten plays, and not the same one. Only by collating them does the section reach ten.
- The prose family loses a counter. Elsewhere the relation runs the other way: through the grappling it is the Getty that carries the counters while the couplets give only the taunt. Here the verse preserves the counter to the section's central action and the prose has nothing in its place.
- Nothing to collate. With one witness there is no variant to weigh. The couplet is the whole evidence, and it describes an intention rather than a technique.
- Illustration. Pisani Dossi 35b-a, necessarily — it is the only witness that depicts the play at all.