Folio 20 / 31
Pisani Dossi 16b (no Getty text)
Freeing oneself from the lance
The Pisani Dossi's stand-alone lance plate — material the Getty gives only as an aside inside its dagger plays ([Dagger 67], [Dagger 69]). It sits on folio 16b, six folios past the rest of the Fifth Master's run, and stands here by concordance with those asides rather than by any witness's page order.
[68] Freeing oneself from a lance
Pisani Dossi · 16b-d
Illustration: Pisani Dossi 16b-d · Text: Pisani Dossi 16b-d
Pisani Dossi · verse translation
With my arms in this way I mean to free myself from the iron,
with the strike that I will make and with my turning;
and if in this way I am not fully freed,
I will quickly have entered into the play before this one.
Flow of actions
- A lance's iron has caught you — the predicament the Fifth Master's plays digress into at [Dagger 67] and [Dagger 69].
- Free yourself with the arms, by two things done together: the strike you make on the iron, and your turning.
- If that does not fully free you —
- by then you have already entered into "the play before this one": break the lance at the socket and come to close quarters.
- No hand is named, and no point on the lance. The verse gives the principle — strike and turn — and a fallback, and nothing more.
The cross-reference is worth following. "The play before this one" is the plate physically above it on Pisani Dossi 16b — which is [Dagger 69], a play Wiktenauer numbers after this one.
Note
In the Pisani Dossi this play and [69] sit on a much later folio (16b) than the rest of the Fifth Master's plays (10a–11a); they stand here by concordance with the Getty's lance material.
Glossological analysis
- "the iron" ([68]) — the lance's head. Fiore names the weapon by its business end, and consistently: the Getty at [Dagger 67] speaks of being "caught on the iron of a lance" and of parting "the haft from the iron head". What you are escaping is not a lance but a point that has fixed you.
- "with the strike ... and with my turning" ([68]) — the escape has two components, not one. The strike breaks the bind; the turn takes you out of it. This is dagger grammar applied to a polearm: the same pairing of blow and rotation that strips a dagger at [Dagger 62] (volta tonda) frees an arm from a spear here.
- "the play before this one" ([68]) — a page-relative cross-reference. It points at the plate physically above it on Pisani Dossi 16b, which is [Dagger 69]. The verses navigate by position on the page, not by any play number — which is exactly why the reference reads backwards against Wiktenauer's sequence.
- "if in this way I am not fully freed" ([68]) — the couplet's own hedge. Note where the extra lines go: this verse runs to four lines rather than two, and spends the surplus on a fallback instead of a boast. The Fifth Master's verse material is candid in a way the rest of the section is not (cf. [Dagger 72]).
Manuscript comparison
- A single-witness play, and a displaced one. [68] exists in the Pisani Dossi alone — no Getty prose, no Paris verse, no Morgan. And it sits on 16b, six folios past the Fifth Master's other plays (10a–11a), placed in this account only by concordance with the Getty's lance asides.
- The two families made opposite editorial decisions about the same teaching. The Getty never grants the lance-escape a play of its own — it surfaces twice, both times buried inside a dagger play ([Dagger 67], [Dagger 69]). The Pisani Dossi does the reverse: it strips the lance out of [Dagger 67]'s couplet altogether and gives the material two dedicated plates on a separate page. Neither family disputes that it belongs to the Fifth Master; they disagree entirely on whether it is a digression or a play.
- The verse's cross-reference contradicts the plate numbers. "I will quickly have entered into the play before this one" points to Pisani Dossi 16b-c — our [Dagger 69] — which the numbering places after [68]. The same mismatch between manuscript position and section number appears at [Dagger 64]/[Dagger 65]. Where a verse says "before" or "behind", it means on the page, and the plate numbers cannot be trusted to agree.
- Illustration. Pisani Dossi 16b-d, its own. No other witness depicts this play.