The Linguistic Turn of the English

Renaissance: A Lacanian Perspective

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The Linguistic Turn of the English
Renaissance

The Linguistic Turn of the English Renaissance: A Lacanian

Perspective examines a selection of cultural phenomena of the
English Renaissance, all of which include a focus on language, from
a Lacanian perspective.
The book examines four inter-related cultural symptoms of the
English Renaissance: the paucity of painting, the interest in rhetoric,
the emergence of a literary style focusing on form and a fascination
with the myth of Orpheus. The book argues that the English
Renaissance, an apex of rhetorical theory, can offer psychoanalysis
further knowledge concerning the intrication of language and flesh,
especially where feminine jouissance is at stake. These language-
centred phenomena emerge against the backdrop of a peculiar
configuration of the visual field, which in contrast to other cultures of
the European Renaissance is largely barren of painting other than
portraiture.
The book will be of interest to psychoanalysts, scholars of
Renaissance culture and those interested in the psychoanalytic study
of culture.

Shirley Zisser practices Lacanian psychoanalysis in Tel Aviv, Israel,

and is a Full Professor and former Chair of English at Tel Aviv
University. Her publications include Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s
A Lover’s Complaint: Suffering Ecstasy, Art, Death and Lacanian
Psychoanalysis (with Efrat Biberman), and Writing, Speech and Flesh
in Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Of Unconscious Grammatology (both
Routledge).
Routledge Focus on Mental Health

Routledge Focus on Mental Health presents short books on current

topics, linking in with cutting-edge research and practice.

Titles in the series:

Psychoanalysis and the Act of Artistic Creation: A Look at

the Unconscious Dynamics of Creativity
Luís Manuel Romano Delgado

Technology in Mental Health: Foundations for Clinical Use

Jessica Stone

Transference in Institutional Work with Psychosis and

Autism: The Transferential Constellation
Pierre Delio, Translated by Agnès Jacob

Life Skills and Adolescent Mental Health: Can Kids Be Taught

to Master Life?
Ole Jacob Madsen

Gender, Sexuality and Subjectivity: A Lacanian Perspective

on Identity, Language and Queer Theory
Duane Rousselle

Lacan, Jouissance and the Social Sciences: The One and the
Many
Raul Moncayo
The Linguistic Turn of the English Renaissance: A Lacanian
Perspective
Shirley Zisser

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit

https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Focus-on-Mental-
Health/book-series/RFMH
The Linguistic Turn of the
English Renaissance
A Lacanian Perspective

Shirley Zisser
First published 2024
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Shirley Zisser
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in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781032490625 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032490649 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003392040 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003392040
Typeset in Times New Roman
by codeMantra
Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Overture: The Other Side of the Renaissance Image

1 Rhetoric
2 Euphues
3 Orpheus

Glossary
Index
Acknowledgements

This is a project whose roots extend back many years. It tracks a

personal trajectory from the study of English Renaissance rhetoric
and poetics through a formation in Lacanian psychoanalysis. I would
like to thank the individuals who were present for me along the
circuitous path this book traces. Dr. Zafra Dan read the chapters as I
wrote them and offered erudite and wise commentary as well as
support. Dr. Tamar Gerstenhaber was always there with brilliant
comments. Prof. Efrat Biberman has been my constant and faithful
companion in the study of the texts of Freud and Lacan for many
years. Thanks are due to my analysts for different ways of holding
me accountable for my words and my analysands, for teaching me
about the intrications of language and jouissance. My most heartfelt
thanks as always are due to my husband, Eyal Zisser, for making my
work, and so much else, possible.
Introduction
DOI: 10.4324/9781003392040-1

The Arte of English Poesie, a rhetorical treatise of the English

Renaissance, offers a definition of poetry starting not from its formal
properties but from its relation to jouissance. “Speech by meeter,” its
author, George Puttenham, asserts

is a kind of vtterance … more delicate to the eare then prose is,

because it is more currant and slipper vpon the tongue, and
withal tunable and melodious, as a kind of Musicke, and
therfore may be tearmed a musicall speech or vtterance, which
cannot but please the hearer very well.1

“Where it speaks, it enjoys (Là où ça parle, ça jouit),” Lacan would

say centuries later, in Encore.2 The utterance of poetic speech slips
upon the tongue smoothly, “currant” as a running (French courant)
current of words, sweet to the palate as currants. An object of oral
jouissance to the speaker, poetic speech proffers aural jouissance to
the recipient, whom it “please[s] very well” by virtue of its quality of
being “delicate to the eare.”
In celebrating the jouissance value of poetic speech, Puttenham
exploits the polysemic resources of English lalangue, a conglomerate
where multiple languages – Anglo-Saxon, French, Celtic and others –
coalesce to generate equivoques (for instance, “courant” and
“current”) that are a hallmark of unconscious discourse. The
irregularity of spelling in sixteenth-century England, where
orthography colludes with homophony, enabling the signifier
“currant,” for instance, to be read at once as the French for
“running” [courant], as the flowing of a current and as the name of
a dried fruit, Corinthian raisin, exponentially increases the English
language’s polysemic potential, its status as lalangue profferring
satisfaction to both tongue and ear, granting literal resonance to
Lacan’s insistence, in his late teaching, on the collocation of speech
and enjoyment.
And yet in his 22nd seminar, R.S.I., Lacan, freshly back from a trip
to London, declares the English lalangue poses an obstacle and is
resistant to the unconscious.3 While this statement has been read as
gesturing towards the unanalysability of the English,4 one would do
well to recall not only Lacan’s incessant recourse to English-language
sources, literary and philosophical, from Edgar Allan Poe to Jeremy
Bentham,5 but the function Freud accorded resistance in the
operation of the unconscious. Resistance, for Freud, is a resource for
the transference. “Only when the resistance is at its height,” he
writes in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through,” “can the
analyst, working in common with his patient, discover the repressed
instinctual impulses which are feeding the resistance.”6 This is
because for Freud, from early on in his work, resistance is a
condition for writing. In the Project for a Scientific Psychology of
1895, Freud postulates the existence of portions of the speaking
organism he calls “ψ neurons” which “afford the possibility of
representing memory” precisely because they are “impermeable,”
that is, “loaded with resistance and holding back Qή.”7 As a
consequence of this resistance, the quantum of psychic energy
passing through those portions of the organism does not leave them
unaltered, as is the case with the permeable, “ϕ neurons,” but frays
them, leaving a trace behind that would become the memory trace
or representation [Vorstellung], what Lacan, following Saussure,
would come to call the unconscious signifier.8 Resistance as a
precondition for writing operates in the transference as well, for it is
there that instinctual impulses as precipitates of psychic quantum
which would otherwise be opaque become legible as transference
phenomena, for instance, the typically hysteric falling in love with
the analyst.9 The hindrance to psychoanalytic work that resistance
provokes is thus not a blockage but a productive obstacle which
functions as a condition of legibility. Thus if the English lalangue is
resistant to the unconscious, what this means is that in the friction
between this lalangue and unconscious mechanisms there is much
that might give itself to be read.
The possibility of texts written in English to serve as productive
obstacles for the generation of knowledge for psychoanalysis is
confirmed at several points of Lacan’s work. It is works of literature
written in English through which Lacan stages his metapsychology at
two landmarks of his teaching: the Écrits, whose opening note is a
seminar on Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” demonstrating the
vicissitudes of the signifier in the unconscious,10 and the 23rd
seminar, The Sinthome, where the works of James Joyce make
possible the development of a radically new metapsychology wherein
a fourth register, made of the debris of the other three, provides the
source material for a singular invention that knots the otherwise
disparate registers together.11 English literature, then, serves Lacan
simultaneously as a source from which metapsychology may be
deduced and a scene on which metapsychology upon its
consequences for clinical practice may be staged. Interspersed in
Lacan’s teaching between the early reference to Poe and the late
reference to Joyce are references to the golden standard of English
literature – the works of William Shakespeare, in particular, in the
sixth seminar, where Hamlet becomes for Lacan a turning plate
displaying the different facets of neurosis.12 The obstacle that
English lalangue poses to psychoanalysis, then, was a productive
one for Lacan, one that led as far as the formulation of a new
metapsychology and a new clinical technique, focused on the
sinthome. What I would like to suggest in this book is that English
culture of Shakespeare’s time, which included a marked engagement
with the question of the subject’s relation with the signifier which is
a crucial and perennial concern of psychoanalysis, is a nexus where
this obstacle may be made no less productive.
The cultural products of the English Renaissance bear witness to a
historical moment which similarly to the apotheosis of courtly love
poetry Lacan dwells on in the Ethics seminar13 touches upon crucial
problems of psychoanalysis. For the English Renaissance evinces an
interest in language unparalleled in English culture before and since.
This interest is especially focused on language’s capacity to morph
into multiple forms of the binding and unbinding of signifiers,
provide aural pleasure, create effects of beauty, trigger affect. It is
as such that the English Renaissance constitutes a resource for
psychoanalytic knowledge. It is as such that this book enlists cultural
productions of this epoch, in order to try and return to
psychoanalysis with knowledge concerning enigmas that always
remain on its side.
What makes the linguistic turn of the English Renaissance a
productive resource for psychoanalysis – a treasury or storehouse, to
use a term Renaissance humanists favoured for compendia of
rhetorical examples and which Lacan resonated via Saussure – is the
richness of its texture where the question of man’s relation to the
signifier is concerned. Far from being manifest only in linguistic
theory, which in this case takes the form of treatises on rhetoric, the
linguistic turn of the English Renaissance includes three other salient
features from which psychoanalysis might turn a profit of
knowledge. One of these is a curious absence in the sphere of visual
art, which accentuates the period’s focus on the pleasures of
language. Another is the emergence of several strikingly self-
reflexive literary texts combining a euphonic style termed
“Euphuism” effected by antitheses, alliterations, isocolons and
erotemas, so foregrounded as to eclipse sense and thus manifesting
what Viktor Shklovsky would theorize centuries later as the hallmark
of the literary,14 with a title including a reference to Euphues,15 a
character introduced by John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
(1578) and Euphues and his England (1580) but conspicuous by its
absence from their storylines. The final cultural phenomenon that
makes the Elizabethan age of interest to psychoanalysis is a
productive screening of the Oedipus myth. In the English
Renaissance, a culture retroactively named for its return to classical
sources, the myth of Oedipus is almost completely absent from
manifest cultural production. Instead, the period is incessantly
preoccupied by the myth of a protagonist renown neither for his
hysteroformic curiosity, nor for his anagnorisic insistence on truth,
what psychoanalyst André Green calls his having “one eye too
many,”16 nor for the passionate excesses of which he at first knows
nothing, but for his skill with melody and words: Orpheus, whose
near homophony with Euphues may not have escaped the savoir lire
of early modern English humanists. It is to the sketching of these
phenomena and the outlining of their productivity for psychoanalysis
that the chapters of this book are dedicated.
Each chapter of the book considers a cultural symptom of the
English Renaissance from the vantage point of Lacanian
psychoanalysis. The overture considers the peculiar configuration of
the visual field in the English Renaissance, rife with portraits of the
queen and her courtiers but otherwise largely barren of painting.
Turning to poetic engagements with the visual field which evince an
uneasy relation to the scopic, the overture shows how in the English
Renaissance the visual image was rendered almost redundant by an
investment in the aural contours of words as major sites of
organizing repressions. Thus eclipsing the seen, English Renaissance
culture created conditions strikingly similar to those of the
psychoanalytic treatment of the neuroses, in which the couch serves
to neutralize the visual register, turning the clinic into a resonance
chamber where the unconscious may be auditivated and read. To
use the words of Stephen Whitworth, English Renaissance culture
beckons us to “close our eyes so that we might awaken to the sound
of a somniloquy,”17 one of the forms wherein the unconscious speaks
and jouissance asserts itself as a wish fulfilled.
The following three chapters consider linguistic phenomena of the
English Renaissance accentuated by the darkening of its visual
scene: the abundance of linguistic theory, manifest in the publication
of rhetorical treatises celebrating the pleasures of the ear, the
emergence of a literary genre – Euphuism – whose true protagonist
is its style, where auricular figures eclipsing sense set the tone and
the repression of the Oedipus myth by a myth Lacan was to
designate as profiling the figure of the psychoanalyst – that of
Orpheus.18 The first of these chapters considers the psychoanalytical
stakes of Renaissance rhetoric, where a nomothetic impulse evincing
a phallic logic is offset by a foregrounding of auricular figures
beyond sense, beyond the phallus, yielding a structure subtended by
two incompatible economies, coeval with the structure of the
feminine unconscious as theorized by psychoanalyst Michèle
Montrelay. The second chapter too considers a linguistic
phenomenon whose valence is double. It focuses on the literary
phenomenon of Euphuism as the English Renaissance equivalent of
the Sophism of the ancient world. It reveals Euphuism as a linguistic
economy whose gorgianesque, schematic quality generates a
jouissance outside sense Lacan would term feminine yet one that is
not without an attenuating phallic limit, the limit of the ear, the
organ par excellence of the analytic cure. The third and final chapter
considers the Orpheus myth so ubiquitous in the English
Renaissance as repressing substitute and index to the Oedipus myth,
almost completely absent from cultural production in early modern
England. At work in the Orphic myth as reiterated in the English
Renaissance, it finds a totemic logic wherein Orpheus, master of
artful combinatories of word and note, paragon of the symbolic, is
cannibalized by the Maenads who thus acquire a phallic limit to their
feminine fury. In all three cases, the salient features of English
Renaissance culture, blossoming against a darkened backdrop
wherein eyes are wide shut and sound predominates, reveal a
double logic that speaks in the feminine, shuttling between a beyond
sense trumping representation and a phallic limit transporting
jouissance to the field of the signifier.

Notes
1. Puttenham, G. (1589). The Arte of English Poesie, London:
Richard Field,
www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16420/pg16420.txt, n.p.
 2. Lacan, J. (1972–1973). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 20:
Encore, trans. B. Fink. New York: Norton, 1998, p. 115.
3. Lacan, J. (1974–1975). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 22:
R.S.I., trans. C. Gallagher from unedited typescripts, lesson of
11.2.1975, www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-
content/uploads/2010/06/RSI-Complete-With-Diagrams.pdf
4. Cléro, J.-P. (2020). Lacan and the English Language, trans. J.
Houis, New York: Agincourt Press, pp. 15–16.
5. Ibid, pp. 20–23.
6. Freud, S. (1914). “Remembering, Repeating and Working
Through,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey et al., London:
Vintage, 2001, 24 Vols., Vol. 12, p. 156.
7. Freud, S. (1895). Project for a Scientific Psychology, The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey et al., London: Vintage, 2001,
24 Vols., Vol. 1, p. 300.
8. For a more detailed account of Freud’s theory of unconscious
representation see Zisser, S. (2022) Writing, Speech, and Flesh
in Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Of Unconscious Grammatology,
London: Routledge.
9. Freud, S. (1915). “Observations on Transference Love,” The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, trans. J. Strachey et al., London: Vintage, 2001,
24 Vols., Vol. 12, p. 163.
10. Lacan, J. (1955). “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Écrits,
trans. B. Fink et al., New York: Norton, 2006, pp. 6–48.
11. Lacan, J. (1975–1976). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 23:
The Sinthome, trans. A. Price, Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2016.
12. Lacan, J. (1958–1959). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 6:
Desire and its Interpretation, trans. B. Fink, Cambridge, MA:
Polity, 2019, p. 324.
13. Lacan, J. (1959–1960). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 7:
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. D. Porter, New York:
Norton, 1997, pp. 139–154.
14. Shklovsky, V. (1917). “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist
Criticism: Four Essays, eds. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reiss, Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 3–24.
15. The Greek meaning of the name is “gracefiul” or “witty.”
16. Green, A. (1969). The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in
Tragedy, trans. A. Sheridan, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979.
17. Whitworth, S. (1999). “Far from Being: Rhetoric and Dream-
Work in Dickenson’s ‘Arisbas,’” Exemplaria, 11.1, p. 168.
18. Lacan, J. (1964). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 11: The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A.
Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1998, p. 25.

References
Cléro, J.-P. (2020). Lacan and the English Language. Trans. J.
Houis. New York: Agincourt Press.
Freud, S. (1895). Project for a Scientific Psychology. The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Trans. J. Strachey et al. London: Vintage, 2001.
24 Vols. Vol. 1, pp. 281–391.
———. (1914). “Remembering, Repeating and Working
Through.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. J. Strachey et al. London:
Vintage, 2001. 24 Vols. Vol. 12, pp. 145–156.
———. (1915). “Observations on Transference Love.” The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud. Trans. J. Strachey et al. London: Vintage, 2001.
24 Vols. Vol. 12, pp. 157–171.
Green, A. (1969). The Tragic Effect: The Oedipus Complex in
Tragedy. Trans. A. Sheridan. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1979.
Lacan, J. (1955). “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter.’” Écrits: The
First Complete Edition in English. Trans. B. Fink et al. New York:
Norton, 2006. pp. 6–48.
———. (1958–1959). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 6:
Desire and its Interpretation. Trans. B. Fink. Cambridge: Polity,
2019.
———. (1959–1960). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 7:
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Trans. D. Porter. New York:
Norton, 1997.
———. (1964). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 11: The
Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. A.
Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1998.
———. (1972–1973). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 20:
Encore. Trans. B. Fink. New York: Norton, 1998.
———. (1974–1975). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 22:
R.S.I. Trans. C. Gallagher from unedited typescripts.
www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/RSI-
Complete-With-Diagrams.pdf
———. (1975–1976). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book 23:
The Sinthome. Trans. A. Price. Cambridge: Polity, 2016.
Lyly, J. (1578). Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and
His England. Ed. M. W. Croll and H. Clemons. London:
Routledge, 1916.
Puttenham, G. (1589). The Arte of English Poesie. London:
Richard Field.
www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/16420/pg16420.txt
Shklovsky, V. (1917). “Art as Technique.” Russian Formalist
Criticism: Four Essays. Eds. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reiss. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1965, pp. 3–24.
Whitworth, S. (1999). “Far from Being: Rhetoric and Dream-
Work in Dickenson’s ‘Arisbas.’” Exemplaria 11.1, pp. 167–194.
Zisser, S. (2022). Writing, Speech, and Flesh in Lacanian
Psychoanalysis: Of Unconscious Grammatology. London:
Routledge.
Overture
The Other Side of the Renaissance Image
DOI: 10.4324/9781003392040-2

The culture of the English Renaissance1 was a culture focused on

sound, on the pleasure of the ear – in itself enough to commend it
as point of interest for psychoanalysis, whose orientation is always
already oto-bio-graphical, as it transfers the savoir lire of what is
heard, initially on the side of the analyst, to the side of the
analysand2 who learns to read the unconsciously inscribed destiny
his bios does not cease to write in symptoms and in the speech he
emits, thus transforming jouissante iteration into a subjective
graphism with which destiny might be written differently. Another
cultural symptom of the English Renaissance lends its aural accent
even more emphasis. Coming at the heels of the Italian quattrocento
whose aesthetic forms (for instance, Petrarchism in poetry, the
madrigal in music) it reworks, the English Renaissance is curiously
lacking in one of the arts that have made Renaissance Italy famous:
painting. Renaissance Italy could boast Raphael, Leonardo,
Michelangelo, Titian, Botticelli, Correggio and many other painters. It
was also the site of the cultural production of an entirely new theory
of sight and visual representation, geometrical perspective, by
theorists such as Leon Battista Alberti. By contrast, in the
idiosyncratic visual style that became distinctive of the Elizabethan
aesthetic, “perspective had no place.”3 The cultural production of
Renaissance England includes objects d’art appealing to the sight
such as miniatures, engravings, frontispieces, woodcuts, emblems
and portraits of dignitaries. But other than in portraiture – in
particular of Queen Elizabeth I and her courtiers4 – the age is
relatively sparse in what Alberti referred to as “the flower of all the
arts”: painting.5 It is perhaps not incidental that the most well-
known painters of the English Renaissance, Anthony Van Dyke, court
painter of Charles I, and Hans Holbein the Younger, whose
anamorphotic skull in The Ambassadors (1533) plays a major role in
Lacan’s theorization of pictorial art in Seminar 116 are not
Englishmen. The first was born in the Low Countries and the second
was a German who lived two significant portions of his life in
England.
Impoverished on the level of painting other than portraiture,
English Renaissance culture proffers ekphrases and allusions to
painting betraying an uneasy relation to the visual field.7
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24 is a case in point

Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled,

Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;
My body is the frame wherein ‘tis held,
And perspective that is best painter’s art.
For through the painter must you see his skill,
To find where your true image pictured lies,
Which in my bosom’s shop is hanging still,
That hath his windows glazed with thine eyes.
Now see what good turns eyes for eyes have done:
Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me
Are windows to my breast, where-through the sun
Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee;
Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art,
They draw but what they see, know not the heart.8

“And perspective that is best painter’s art” – the line is grammatically

awkward; its rhythm jars, iambs smashing into an anapest that has
left commentators perplexed. Why does the poem trip itself up when
speaking of perspective? Shakespeare’s anapestic declaration alludes
to the new geometry-based technique for transposing three-
dimensional objects to two-dimensional representations, and evokes
not only Leon Battista Alberti’s specification of the laws of
geometrical perspective, but also his celebration of the art of
painting as the flower of all the arts. Yet Shakespeare’s speaker
proceeds to denigrate this art as wanting in “cunning,” for the eyes
on which it depends “draw but what they see, know not the heart”
(ll. 4, 14), or perhaps better, (he)art.9 Painting’s “true image pictured
lies” not only because, as Lacan frequently notes, truth has the
structure of fiction, for no matter what the subject articulates at a
given moment of syncopation, of the unconscious folding inside out,
something of the unconscious etched onto the subject’s flesh
quintessentially escapes the image which constitutively includes
something of the specular, hence of captation. In so denigrating
perspective, Shakespeare was echoing the ambivalence of
contemporary English painters with regard to this new technique,
perhaps best summed up in the words of Nicholas Hilliard, one of
the age’s prominent miniature portrait painters, who wrote that
perspective is a visual optical device that can be deployed “according
to the rule of the eye, by falsehood to expresse truth.”10
For Hilliard as for Shakespeare in Sonnet 24, perspective lies; it is
a deceiving falsehood. This is a view that differs not only from that
of the Italian theorists and the painters who turned their theory into
pictorial masterpieces, but also from that of Lacan. For Lacan,
geometrical perspective, while not exhausting the “original
subjectifying relation,”11 does index it by means of its vanishing
point which is nothing if not the graphic registration of the
particularity of his angle of vision12 and by means of its
anamorphotic distortion wherein, as in Holbein’s Ambassadors, the
subject may encounter his own castration.13 But for Shakespeare in
this sonnet perspective is a (s)kill that kills, damaging subjectivity by
stultifying it in the immobile world of the image. Painting for
Shakespeare is tanathographic – a qualification resonating the
collocation of painting and death in the myth of the invention of
painting as told by Pliny the Elder in Natural History.14 The sonnet’s
prosodic structure trips on the signifier “perspective” because even
this most advanced technique of painting does not save the visual
field from being a site of the death drive, where objects are
inanimate, “hang … still” (l. 7).
Another poetic meditation on the deviousness of images can be
found in a poem by Richard Crashaw, English Baroque poet of
suffering ecstasy and occasional portrait painter, “The Flaming Heart
Upon The Book And Picture Of Saint Teresa (As she is usually
expressed with a Seraphim beside her)” (1652). The poem begins
with an appeal to a modified mode of reading the conventional
hagiographic image:

Well meaning readers! you that come as friends

And catch the precious name this piece pretends;
Make not too much haste to admire
That fair-cheeked fallacy of fire.
That is a Seraphim, they say
And this the great Teresia.
Readers, be rul’d by me; and make
Here a well-plac’d and wise mistake
You must transpose the picture quite,
And spell it wrong to read it right;
Read him for her, and her for him;
And call the saint the Seraphim.15

“You must transpose the picture quite /and spell it wrong to read it
right” (ll. 9–10), Crashaw writes of conventional pictorial
representations of St. Theresa, whose rapt expression in Bernini’s
sculpted portrayal famously served Lacan to exemplify a feminine
jouissance defying speech.16 What speech fails to contain the image
cannot divulge, Crashaw implies, unless subjected to a “well-plac’d
and wise mistake” (l. 8). What the mistake in question pertains to is
the common depiction of St. Theresa covered by a veil, and of the
angel facing her as holding a dart. “Give him the veil; that he may
cover / The red cheeks of a rivall’d lover,” Crashaw asks of his
reader; “Give her the dart for it is she” who “sends … a Seraphim at
every shot” (ll. 42–44, 47, 54).
 The mistake in conventional hagiographic representation, the
exchange of dart and wound between St. Theresa and the Seraphim
is an exchange on the level of the grammar of the drive. One of the
vicissitudes of the drive, Freud writes in “Drives and their
Vicissitudes,” is a reversal into the opposite, for instance from
activity into passivity: “the active aim (to torture, to look at), is
replaced by the passive aim (to be tortured, to be looked at).”17
Freud emphasizes that the primary aim of the drive is active, a thesis
that has deep roots in Freudian metapsychology. In the Project for a
Scientific Psychology Freud speaks of the subject’s archaic state of
helplessness [hilflosigkeit] which necessitates the turning to an
extraneous experienced person so that they might perform a
“specific action” that would relieve the subject’s urgency, his needs
of life [Not das Lebens].18 Exiting helplessness, a catastrophic state
in which the quantum of psychic energy is invested in the psychic
apparatus itself, and that is therefore coeval with the intolerable
state Freud would later call primary narcissism, depends on diverting
psychic energy from the apparatus to an Other who might respond.
The most archaic configuration of the drive is thus active, sadistic,
while “a primary masochism … seems not to be met with.”19 In “The
Economic Problem of Masochism,” Freud reverses or rather refines
his view, asserting that “primal sadism is identical with masochism”20
– a phrase to which Crashaw’s poem grants resonance.
“Loves passives are its activ’st part,” Crashaw writes, “the
wounded is the wounding heart” (ll. 74–75). In her only seemingly
masochistic suffering ecstasy, Theresa wounds the observer affected
by her injury. The “mistake” Crashaw asks his readers to make, then,
involves the isolation of the grammar of the drive the image portrays
and its inversion from passive to active, an operation of reading
whose quotient is a wounding wound. That this reading is
necessitated in the first place is an effect of a pictorial
commonplace, a “fallacy of fire” (l. 4) whose constituting
propositions are the contours of an image. As in Shakespeare’s
sonnet, visuality is a deceptive locus, where subjective logic is
blurred, recuperable, if at all, only via the inverted logic of the
mistake.
John Lyly’s Euphues and Euphues in his England, proto-novels
whose ornate style had a marked influence on the literature of
sixteenth-century England, include repeated allusions to painting,
most of them invoking references, at times spurious, to stories
regarding celebrated painters of ancient times from Pliny the Elder’s
Natural History. Lyly’s texts, whose enargaeic, image-evoking
dimension is drastically limited to the profit of the foregrounding of a
heavily ornate style largely eclipsing image and sense, nevertheless
include epistles dedicatory pursuing an extended conceit in which
their artistry is compared to that of legendary and mythic image-
makers.21 In the first instance of this conceit, the author invokes a
principle of pictorial art attributed to Parrhasius and Apelles,
according to which painting is to include a “fault” or “blemish.”22 In
the second instance, an expression of modesty attributed to the first
painter, Phidias, is invoked in order to assert the ability of an
illustrious addressee to transform not the image but its very
substrate for the better: “the face of Alexander stamped in copper
doth make it current, that the name of Caesar wrought in canvas is
esteemed as cambric.”23 But Alexander is precisely the scarred
protagonist of the anecdote attributed to Apelles who painted
Alexander’s attempt to hide his scar with his finger24 – the purveyor
of the blemish onto the substrate of representation upgraded not
despite but because of it. The blemish or wound, corporeal mark of
jouissance, is endemic to the pain-t(h)ing that does not cover it;
index, perhaps, of what is exposed on its reverse side.
In a myth of no known classical source, which is the last instance
of the painting conceit in the dedicatory epistles to Lyly’s Euphues
texts,25 mythical weaver Arachne responds to criticism regarding
colours missing from her tapestry by suggesting that her critic seek
them “on the other side of the cloth,” correlative to “the backside of
the book”26 and to matters of love which cannot be seen on Venus’s
painted face as they are to be found “hanging “at Venus’s back in a
budget [purse].”27 What a woman cannot represent but pertains to a
psychic site whose description as a “budget” or container inflects it,
in Freud’s terms in “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” as a “symbol
… of what is essential in woman”28 – is it not what relates to what
Freud would qualify as the dark continent of feminine sexuality,
beyond the bar? That the unexplorable of feminine sexuality is not
given to pictorial representation, to captation in the image, Lyly
implies, does not mean that it cannot be discerned in signs that
become visible at the point where the image dissolves into its
material substrate and scaffolding.
But perhaps the most precise poetic formulation of the duplicitous
status of the image in English Renaissance culture occurs in John
Donne’s “Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.”29 Like Crashaw, Donne
enjoins his addressee to read differently

Study me then, you who shall lovers be

At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

It is the relative darkness of “the year’s midnight” (l. 1), its shortest
day, that enables the speaker, though “ruined,” to be paradoxically
“rebegot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not” (ll.
17–18). It is in darkness and the blindness paradoxically ascribed to
St. Lucy, patron saint of sight, that the speaker experiences a “new
alchemy,” a “quintessence even from nothingness” (ll. 13, 15). The
relative darkness, then, is one in which the productivity of negativity
is underwritten, for its radical reductiveness forces the extraction of
an “elixir” (ll. 15, 29) operative only in an obscurity that obliterates
the very possibility of the image.
The relative absence of painting other than portraiture from the
sphere of art, matched by a scepticism regarding the reliability,
veracity and even possibility of images such as evinced by the
literary examples cited above renders the culture of the English
Renaissance a site of obscurity in the visual field. How might we
read this obscurity psychoanalytically? In his disquisition on the gaze
as objet petit a in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
Lacan theorizes the gaze as an elusive object that “slips, passes, is
transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always in some degree
eluded.”30 This object that the neurotic subject cannot seize is
nevertheless what in the visual field is of the subject and looks back
at, sees the subject, as Lacan demonstrates by means of an
anecdote of a sardine can floating in the ocean, its surface glittering
in the sunlight. Lacan’s fisherman companion amusedly remarks that
while Lacan can see the can, the can cannot see him; but Lacan,
failing to share his friend’s amusement, remarks that “that which is
light looks at me” as a “point of gaze” unsettling iridescence.31 And
yet the gaze that unsettles iridescence, mars every jewel, can even,
in the field of the psychoses, become persecutory, may nevertheless
be pacified. Indeed, its pacification is what is effected in the field of
painting. In giving “something for the eye to feed on,” painting
invites the person to whom it is presented “to lay down his gaze
there as one lays down one’s weapons.”32 If not pacified nor veiled,
the gaze rises, always at least unsettling an iridescence that might
be, possibly menacing. But what if it encounters something other
than an image that can pacify it?
The possibility of painting without image is suggested by another
reference to ancient painters in Lyly’s Euphues texts. In Euphues and
his England, Lyly recounts a scene where Fidus, an old Englishmen,
tries to dissuade Euphues from enquiring too much into the workings
of the monarchy by telling an anecdote of Alexander and Apelles
which does not have a source in Pliny. When Alexander came into
Apelles’s shop, Lyly writes, “Apelles placed him at his back; who
going to his own work, did not so much as cast an eye back to see
Alexander’s devices.” In response to Alexander’s question as to how
he could paint his portrait without seeing him, Apelles replies: “‘For
Apelles’ shadows are to be seen of Alexander, but not Alexander’s of
Apelles.’”33 If in the myth of the invention of painting as told by Pliny
what is painted is not a person but his shadow, trace of his being
(always) already lost, in the pseudo-Plinian anecdote fomented by
Lyly what is painted is not even the shadow. The painter paints what
he does not see, what is veiled from his eye. In another pseudo-
Plinian anecdote, Parrhasius, vying for Alexander’s patronage is said
to have presented him with a canvas whose borders he “trimmed
with fresh colours and limned with fine gold, leaving all the other
room without knot or line”34 that is, with an empty frame, “a table …
not coloured.” It is as empty, not coloured, Lyly adds, that
Parrhasius’s canvas invoked “desire.”35 In yet another anecdote, this
time one that does have a source in Pliny and is repeated by other
authors, including Cicero and, in the Renaissance, Erasmus, Zeuxis is
said to have painted Venus from her back so realistically that the
painting affected Apelles himself as a trompe l’oeil, as seeing this
work, “he wished that Venus would turn her face.”36 In all three
cases, what is painted is not what is seen but what isn’t.
What the poets of the Elizabethan age attest to in their ekphrases
and allusions to painting, then, is a veiling of the seen which is not
the unaestheticizing trap of painting Lacan would speak of but a
productive screening wherein what remains operative beyond the
image is its psychic and material origin, an imprint. The archaic root
of the image, Françoise Dolto writes, is not visual but tactile. Before
unifying specularity intervenes, retroactively giving sense to marks
on a page or canvas, there is the first drawing—tactile imprint of
umbilical cord on palm, a “signifier made flesh,” or “language of the
hand,” which remains tacitly operative in any drawn
representation.37 The hagiographic tale of Veronica in which the
flesh and blood of Christ is imprinted on her cloth38 gives mythic
form to drawing as Dolto theorizes it, as in both cases, drawing is an
imprint of a body part on a receiving substrate.
In English Renaissance culture, where the paucity of painting
makes near blindness prevail, a consequently enhanced gaze
encounters not a screening image but, as Donne implies, its
quintessence or elixir. This elixir is a fleshly imprint, letter, encounter
of flesh and jouissance, pictogram (visible gramma, letter) which
Piera Aulagnier, in a concept broader than Dolto’s because it touches
upon an archaic that is less primal, would precise as psychically
registered damage of an encounter of erogenous zone and object
not entirely cut off from it where both are cut off from word
presentation.39 It is such a pictogram, elixir of the letter inscribed on
the reverse side of the image that pulsates in and invigorates40 the
darkened pictorial space of English Renaissance culture that beckons
us to read with the precision such as Freud has taught us to discern
in our errors.
The historical conditions that made the English Renaissance
downplay the visual register may be various, and certainly include
the iconoclasm which was so integral to the Protestantism that
swept the age.41 The end result, however, was a largely invocational
culture in which the near-blindness indexed by the paucity of
painting functioned as a condition for speech and for listening, for
auditivation and auscultation. In foregrounding a near blindness in
the cultural sphere, the English Renaissance underscores not only
the operativity of primal material traces within the image, but,
inseparably, the operativity of the near absence of the image in the
ascendance of the vocable, which becomes the preferred mode of
form-making repressing an unbearable real. The ear, psychoanalyst
Michele Montrelay writes, “stops at the fixed forms of words … as
though they were contours.”42 It is the ear that is championed in the
literature and literary theory of the Elizabethan age, while the eye is
invited to repress mainly by means of the perennial phallophany of
the Queen. Only in her Rainbow portrait do eyes and ears appear in
equal measure as jewels decorating her sumptuous attire. Before the
Baroque aesthetic of the Restoration with its visual excesses, the
Elizabethan age hovered at the aural contours of words to an extent
that rendered the image almost redundant. This repressing hovering
on the aural, more than anything else explains the relative absence
of painting from Elizabethan England, darkened culture in which
repressing form subsisted for the most part in the ear.43
Another random document with
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ciencia y la experiencia de
manera que no lo sepa curar. Que
hay pocos boticarios en España
que sepan lo que han de saber y
lo que se requiere para no errar,
no puedo negarlo, y que hay
también muchos que, sabiéndolo,
pecan con malicia y que la codicia
se antepone en ellos á la
conciencia, también lo creo, y aun
lo sé, porque lo he visto estando
tratando en las casas y tiendas de
muchos boticarios, donde pasan
cosas extrañas y tan
desordenadas que me han
espantado, y sin duda los malos
boticarios, de cualquier manera
que sea, son cruel pestilencia
para los pueblos, y yo confiesso
que no hay cosa más justa que
remediarlo si fuesse posible; y
porque no puedan decir los
culpados que en mi se cumple el
proverbio ¿quién es tu enemigo?
hombre de tu oficio, no quiero
extenderme á más, que por
ventura pndiera decir otros
muchos y mayores secretos de
las maldades que hacen que no
han venido á noticia del señor
licenciado. Pero con todo esto no
quiero que se dé toda la culpa á
los boticarios en muchas cosas
que tienen la mayor parte los
médicos, aun á las veces es toda,
y así las autoridades que vuesa
merced ha alegado de Jacobo
Silvio contra los malos boticarios,
si tiene memoria dello, también
las dice contra los que no son
buenos médicos, porque en aquel
proemio contra los unos y los
otros va hablando.
Lerma.—Creo que decís la
verdad, pero poco es lo que vos
ni nadie podrá decir contra los
médicos en comparación de lo
que yo he dicho y se podría decir
contra los boticarios.
Dionisio.—Si vuesa merced
quiere tener sufrimiento para oirlo,
no le parecerá sino mucho; que
no es menor el daño ni perjuicio
que hacen en la república, ni
habría menos razón para que los
desconciertos que dellos se
siguen se remediasen.
Lerma.—Decid lo que
quisiéredes, que quiero que estos
señores no digan que no cumplo
mi palabra.
Pimentel.—Ni aun sería justo
que se dexase de cumplir, y vos,
señor Dionisio, decid lo que os
pareciere, pues que el señor
licenciado no tiene tanta priesa
que no pueda detenerse otro
tanto para escucharos como se
ha detenido para hacer verdadero
lo que al principio propuso contra
los boticarios.
Lerma.—Forzado me sería hacer
lo que vuestras mercedes
mandan, aunque en verdad que
hago alguna falta á dos ó tres
enfermos que tengo de visitar.
D. Gaspar.—Tiempo habrá para
todo, que si la plática se dexase
en estos términos, era quedar
pleito pendiente, y lo mejor será
que luego se determine.
Dionisio.—Aunque yo tenía harto
en que alargarme, procuraré ser
breve diciendo en suma lo que
cerca desto entiendo, pues no
será necesario más de apuntarlo
para que vuestras mercedes lo
entiendan y estén al cabo de
todo. Y digo lo primero que lo que
Ipocras dice de los que no son
buenos médicos en el libro que se
llama Introductorio son las
palabras siguientes: Muy
semejantes son éstos á los que
se introducen en las tragedias,
porque tienen la figura y vestidos
y atavíos y aun la presencia de
médicos de la misma manera que
los hipócritas, y así hay muchos
médicos de nombre y que lo sean
en las obras son muy pocos.
Pues Ipocras evangelista de los
médicos es llamado, y podemos
tener por cierto que en ninguna
cosa de lo que cerca desto dice
recibe engaño, y pluguiese á Dios
que en nuestros tiempos no
acertase tan de veras como
acierta en esto que ha dicho,
porque así no habría los daños y
grandes inconvenientes que para
la salud de los enfermos se
siguen por falta de los buenos
médicos.
Lerma.—Assí es como vos decís,
señor Dionisio; pero decime:
¿quiénes son essos malos
médicos, que yo á todos los tengo
por buenos?
Dionisio.—Antes son tan pocos
los buenos médicos, que apenas
hay ninguno que no sea malo,
como vuesa merced ha dicho de
los boticarios, y por no gastar
palabras, quiérome ir declarando
más particularmente, para que
nos entendamos, de las
condiciones que se requieren
para que un médico cumpla con
Dios y con el mundo. La primera,
que sea hombre justo, temeroso
de Dios y de su conciencia,
conforme á lo que Salomón dice
(Eccl., I): El principio de la
sabiduría es el temor que á Dios
se tiene; porque el que no llevare
su fundamento sobre esto, no
podrá hacer las curas suficientes
ni que aprovechen á los
enfermos, y así dice Galeno:
Aquel cuyo juicio fuere débil y
cuya ánima fuere mala, no
aprenderá aquello que se enseña
en esta ciencia, y esto es porque
su fin no es de aprovechar á su
prójimo con ella, sino á sí mismo.
No sé yo qué temor de Dios
tienen los médicos que curan sin
tener la ciencia y experiencia y las
otras cosas necessarias y
convinientes para que curen, y si
éstas les faltan, y faltándoles con
la codicia de la ganancia se
ponen á curar no sabiendo lo que
hacen, no solamente pecan, pero
dañan su ánima; de manera que
no podrán aprender lo que son
obligados á saber, como Galeno
les ha dicho, ni tampoco puede
ser piadoso ni misericordioso el
médico que cura las
enfermedades que no conoce, ni
sabe, ni entiende; antes es muy
gran crueldad y inhumanidad la
que usan, pues que, ó por ganar
dineros ó por no confesar su
iñorancia, ponen los enfermos en
el peligro de la muerte y no
guardan lo que Rasis dice,
trayéndolo por autoridad de un
gran médico judío, que los
médicos han de ser muy piadosos
con los enfermos, para que con
mayor cuidado y diligencia curen
dellos.
Lerma.—¿Pues cómo sabéis vos
que los médicos no tienen
suficiencia y habilidad que se
requiere para curar, de manera
que no cumplan con lo que deben
á su conciencia?
Dionisio.—Ya yo he dicho que no
son todos los médicos, sino que
hablo con la mayor parte dellos, y
si vuesa merced quiere que le
declare lo que sabe muy mejor
que yo lo entiendo, quiero
aclararme más para que estos
señores lo entiendan. Cruel cosa
y fuera de todo término de
razones la que se consiente y
permite á los médicos que
después que se van á estudiar á
las universidades, con tres ó
cuatro años que han oido de
medicina presumen luego de
ponerse á curar, ó por mejor decir
á matar los enfermos. Y con tres
maravedís de ciencia quieren
ganar en un año quinientos
ducados, porque su intención es á
sola ganancia, no teniendo
atención á lo que Ipocras dice en
su juramento, que siempre su
principal intención será en curar á
los enfermos, sin tener respecto á
lo que por ello se ha de ganar.
Lerma.—Mal podéis vos juzgar
las intenciones de los médicos.
Dionisio.—Antes muy bien se
pueden juzgar de las obras que
hacen, porque si el médico es
necio de su natural, mal acertará
en el remedio de la vida de un
hombre, donde tan gran
discreción se requiere, y si es
sabio, ha de saber que con tan
poca ciencia no ha de presumir
de hacer lo que otros con mucha
no pueden ni saben, y con este
conocimiento está obligado á no
curar hasta que pueda tener
mejor constanza de sí, y si no lo
hacen, claro está que la codicia
de la ganancia les hace poner en
aventura la salud y vida de los
hombres en si aciertan ó no
aciertan en la cura que hacen.
D. Gaspar.—Pues si esso es así,
¿cuándo han de comenzar á
curar los médicos?
Dionisio.—Cuando tuvieren la
ciencia suficiente y la práctica que
se requiere para ponerla en obra.
D. Gaspar.—No os entiendo lo
que queréis decir.
Dionisio.—Digo, que no
solamente un médico ha de tener
muy gran ciencia y saber muy
bien los preceptos y reglas de
medicina, sino que también ha de
tener muy larga y conocida
experiencia de las enfermedades
y de la manera y orden que han
de tener en curarse. Porque el
principal fundamento está en
conocerlas, y esta experiencia
requiere muy largo tiempo,
conforme á lo que Ipocras dice:
La vida de los hombres es muy
breve y la arte es muy luenga; el
tiempo es agudo y la experiencia
engañosa. Si esto es así verdad,
¿qué experiencia pueden tener
los que ayer salieron del estudio,
ni los que ha un año, ni dos, ni
seis que curan, á lo menos si las
curas que hacen son con sólo su
parecer y por su albedrío?
Pimentel.—Muy poca ó ninguna,
y cuando viniera á tenerla,
habrían ya muerto más hombres
que sanado enfermos.
D. Gaspar.—¿Pues qué han de
hacer los médicos para no errar?
Dionisio.—Lo que dice el señor
licenciado de los boticarios: que
es, tratar mucho tiempo su oficio
antes que comiencen á usar dél
por su actoridad, y primero que se
atrevan á hacer una experiencia
la han de haber visto muchas
veces, ó á lo menos otra
semejante; y esto ha de ser
curando mucho tiempo los
médicos mancebos en compañía
de los viejos experimentados, lo
que no hace ninguno, porque con
la leche en los labios de lo que
han estudiado, les parece que
son bastantes á curar cualquiera
enfermedad por sí solos, y si la
ganancia no estuviese de por
medio, todavía se humillarían á lo
que son obligados; porque no
basta que den muy buena razón
de lo que les preguntassen si no
lo saben obrar, conforme á lo que
dice Avicena: Que no basta en la
medicina la razón sin la
experiencia ni la experiencia sin la
razón, porque ambas son
menester y han de andar juntas la
una con la otra.
Pimentel.—¿Pues qué han de
hacer los médicos en tanto que
no pudiesen ganar de comer?
Que según esso primero llegarán
á viejos que justamente puedan
llevar alguna ganancia.
Dionisio.—Que coman de sus
patrimonios, y si no lo tienen, que
lo procuren por otra vía, que no
ha de ser su ganancia tan á costa
y perjuicio de las repúblicas que
sean los médicos peor pestilencia
y más crueles verdugos que los
boticarios, como el señor
licenciado ha dicho, pues que
están obligados á cumplir el
juramento que su evangelista juró
en nombre de todos ellos.
Lerma.—Bien sería si los
médicos de agora que fuesen
como los de los tiempos pasados
que esso escribieron, que
hablaban á su seguro y sin
necesidad de ganar de comer por
su trabajo, que Ipocras, señor fué
de la isla de Coo y tan rico y
poderoso, que no quiso las
riquezas de un potentísimo rey
que se las ofrecía por que le
fuese á curar de una enfermedad,
ni después temió sus amenazas
porque no quiso hacerlo. Avicena,
príncipe fué del reino de Córdoba.
Hamech, hijo fué de un rey, y así
otros muchos médicos que se
podrían decir semejantes á éstos;
pero los que agora aprendemos
esta arte es para sustentarnos
con ella y no para mostrarnos
sabios y ganar honra solamente,
como ellos.
Dionisio.—Yo no quito que del
trabajo se saque el premio para
sustentarse los médicos; pero
querría que con mayor cuidado
procurasen que yo no tuviese
razón en lo que digo, porque
verdaderamente por lo menos
habrían de haber visto curar y
tratar las enfermedades cinco ó
seis años antes que tuviesen
licencia de curar por si solos:
porque sabe un médico dar razón
de las alteraciones que ha de
haber en un pulso para que un
enfermo tenga calentura, y
cuando le toma el pulso no lo
conoce por falta de experiencia, y
muchas veces desta manera
vemos que curando dos médicos
á un enfermo, el uno dice que
tiene calentura y el otro que está
sin ella, y así mesmo yerran
diversas veces, teniendo unas
enfermedades por otras; y cuando
Galeno, siendo tan excelentísimo
médico, confiesa de sí mesmo
haberse engañado una vez que
teniendo mal de cólico y muy gran
dolor pensó que le procedía de
tener piedra en los reñones,
haciendo diferentes remedios de
los que para aquella enfermedad
eran necesarios, ¿qué harán
estos médicos de quien yo digo, y
más no teniendo las
enfermedades en sus mesmos
cuerpos para sentirlas, sino en los
ajenos, donde por la mayor parte
juzgan por adivinanzas? Y el no
conocer bien los médicos las
enfermedades que son tan
diversas y diferentes es causa de
venir á morir muchos de los que
las tienen, que siendo curados
dellas con los remedios que se
les suelen hacer no perderían las
vidas; y sin esto, ¿qué menos
obligación tienen los médicos que
los boticarios á conocer si las
medicinas son buenas ó malas, y
escoger las mejores cuando
mandan hacer una purga ó unas
píldoras ó otra cosa semejante,
para que los boticarios no los
engañen, que así la culpa es de
los unos y de los otros? Por cierto
cosa es para reir ver algunos
médicos de los nuevos, y aun de
los viejos, ir á nuestras boticas y
pedir que les mostremos las
medicinas y tomar las peores por
las mejores, y algunas veces
unas por otras, y el xarabe que
está bueno dicen que está malo, y
el que está malo alaban por
bueno, tanto que muchas veces
nos burlamos dellos,
mostrándoles una cosa por otra
sin que lo conozcan. Y no para en
esto la fiesta, sino que hay
médicos que recetan disparates, y
cosas que bastarían á matar á los
sanos, cuanto más é los
enfermos, y tienen necesidad las
boticarios de remediarlo, por no
ser participantes en la culpa, que
si las medicinas obran bien,
quieren ellos llevarlas gracias, y si
mal, que nos den á nosotros por
culpados. También hacen otra
cosa perjudicial á sus conciencias
y honras, y es que se aficionan á
unos boticarios más que á otros
para darles provecho, no teniendo
respecto á lo que saben y
entienden, ni al aparejo que
tienen, sino á los servicios que les
hacen, porque les dan parte de
las ganancias; y aunque no sea
tan descubiertamente, en fin,
aprovéchanse dellos en las
haciendas y en las personas, y el
boticario que no les sirviere y
anduviere bailando delante, poca
medra tiene con ellos; y de aquí
nace que pocas veces los
médicos son amigos de los
buenos boticarios, porque
confiando en su saber y bondad y
en el buen aparejo de medicinas
que hay en sus tiendas, no les
quieren tener aquel respecto que
ellos desean y procuran, y con
esto no medran mucho con la
ganancia que les dan, porque se
la quitan cuando pueden.
Pimentel.—Si todos los
boticarios les dan el trato que vos
agora les dais, poca razón
tendrán de serles amigos; pero
pasad adelante, porque me
parece que os queda más que
decir.
Dionisio.—No sería poco si se
hubiese de decir todo; pero
todavía quiero pasar más larga la
carrera, que yo me iré abreviando
por no cansar á vuesas
mercedes. Por cierto, cosa es de
notar, y aun de burlar, ver á los
médicos ponerse en los portales
de sus casas, esperando por las
mañanas que les traigan las
orinas de los lugares comarcanos
donde viven, que las unas son
tomadas cuatro horas ha y otras
seis, y algunas por ventura de
una noche ó de todo un día
vienen mazadas y botadas, que
no parecen sino lodo, y así las
están mirando como si estuviesen
para conocerse las enfermedades
por ellas, habiendo de estar la
orina tomada por lo más de una
hora y reposada en el orinal para
que no esté revuelto el hipostasis,
y con esto cumplen los pobres
simples, para que les den dineros
por ello, y si á un médico destos
le llaman para cien enfermos, á
todos irá á visitar y á curarlos de
cualquiera enfermedades que
tengan, no teniendo tiempo de
estudiar para los seis dellos, ni
para acabar de entender lo que
curan y los remedios necesarios,
y así andan ciegos y desatinados
en lo que es necesario tener el
mayor concierto y tino del mundo,
fuera de la salvación del ánima,
porque no han de confiar de lo
que han estudiado ni de lo que
tienen en sus memorias, sino de
ver de nuevo cada día y cada
hora cómo se ha de curar la
enfermedad que tienen entre
manos y qué remedios se le han
de aplicar para sanarla.
Pimentel.—No me parece que
tenéis tanta razón en lo que decís
que no podáis engañaros, porque
los médicos viejos que han visto y
estudiado mucho, con lo que
saben pueden curar sin tornar á
ver los libros tantas veces como
vos decís.
Dionisio.—A los que eso
hicieren, acaescerles ha como á
los predicadores, que siendo
grandes teólogos, presumen de
hacer algunos sermones sin
estudiar los primeros, y por una
vez que aciertan á llevarlos bien
ordenados, diez veces se pierden,
de manera que luego se les
conoce que lo que predican es sin
estudio, y cuando yerran, es ésta
la disculpa que tienen; así los
médicos que quieren curar las
enfermedades sin estudiar de
nuevo para cada una dellas, por
una que aciertan, errarán
muchas, para acabar la vida de
aquellos que se ponen en sus
manos por alargarla.
D. Gaspar.—Todas estas faltas
se suplen con la discreción y
buen natural de un médico, y
muchas veces aprovecha más
con ello que con la arte ni con
cuanta medicina han estudiado.
Dionisio.—No digo yo menos que
esso, y vuestra merced me ha
quitado de trabajo en echarlo en
el corro, para que aquí se declare;
pero diga vuestra merced
¿cuántos médicos hay hoy con
las propiedades y condiciones
que cerca de eso se requieren?
Pluguiese á Dios que antes les
faltase parte de la ciencia que no
el buen natural y el juicio claro,
reposado y assentado, porque
teniéndolo, con él suplirían
muchas faltas, juzgando con
discreción en algunas cosas, que
sólo ella bastaría; porque la
buena estimativa, como dice
Averroes, sola hace bueno al
médico. Lo mismo tiene
Halirodoan y Galeno en el primero
de los días críticos, y conforme á
esto Damasceno: el ingenio
natural del médico con pequeño
fundamento ayuda á la
naturaleza, y el que es defetuoso
hace el effeto contrario. Pues
siendo esto assí, como estos
autores dicen, ¿qué podrán hacer
muchos médicos alterados, locos,
desasosegados, elevados y, lo
que peor es de todo, muy grandes
necios? Por cierto, en los tales
como éstos yo tengo en muy poco
la ciencia que tienen, porque no
sabrán usar della por mucha que
tengan, ni aprovechar á los que
tuvieren necesidad de su ayuda.
Porque los unos dellos todo lo
que saben lo tienen en el pico de
las lenguas, alegando textos y
autoridades á montones sobre
cada cosa que se trata, sabiendo
entenderla para tratarla y no para
usar della. Otros que les parece
que todo su saber consiste en
sustentar opiniones contrarias de
los otros médicos; y en fin si les
preguntasen dónde está el bazo ó
el hígado, apenas sabrían
mostrarlo, porque, como he dicho,
no lo han tratado ni tienen
experiencia dello. Y estos tales
son como unos marineros que
saben aritmética, cosmografía y
astrología, y dan buena razón de
todo lo que les preguntan cerca
de la arte de marear, y les
pusiessen un timón de una nave
en las manos, presto la pondrían
en trabajo y peligro de anegarse,
por no saber gobernarla y guiarla,
y así como se hiciese pedazos en
las peñas ó se encallase en
algunos vaxios, para no poder
salir de la arena, porque no
conocen la tierra, ni saben los
puertos donde acogerse, ni los
lugares seguros donde echar
áncoras hasta que pase la
tempestad y tormenta. Y así los
médicos que no han visto las
enfermedades ni las han curado
otras veces, no saben guiarlas á
puerto seguro, ni sacarlas de los
peligros desta mar del mundo en
que navegamos, y dan con los
enfermos al través; de suerte que
en lugar de sacarlos á puerto de
salvación, los llevan al de
perdición de su salud y vida; y de
estas cosas muchas remedia el
buen entendimiento, y el buen
natural y claro juicio y la buena
estimativa á donde la hay, aunque
esto todo juntamente con las
letras necesarias pocas veces y
en pocos médicos se halla, y
éstos pierden la bondad que
tienen por el fin que pretenden de
las riquezas, que la codicia les
hace desordenarse de manera
que no atienden tanto á hacer con
su habilidad cuanto á sacar el
provecho que pueden della, y así
hacen mil descuidos y desatinos,
proveyendo lo que conviene á las
enfermedades sin haber
estudiado sobre ellas, no mirando
lo que dice Galeno: Que conviene
al médico ser muy estudioso para
que no diga ni provea alguna
cosa en la enfermedad que curare
absolutamente y sin haberla
primero bien mirado. Al médico
que esto hiciese no le acaecería
lo que á mí me han contado de
uno que mirando cierta
enfermedad de un hombre dixo
que con muy gran brevedad la
curaría, y el enfermo, que lo
deseaba, oyendo esto dióle
mayor priesa al médico. Por
abreviar, mandóle que, así como
había de tomar para purgarse
cuatro ó cinco xarabes que
digestiesen el humor, que se
trajesen todos juntos y que los
tomase de una vez, pareciéndole
que por ser la mesma cantidad
haría el mesmo efeto que si se
tomaran en cinco días; y así le dió
luego la purga, la cual nunca le
salió del cuerpo, porque se murió
con ella, lo cual por ventura no
pasara si el tiempo ayudara á los
xarabes repartidos, que en cinco
días tuvieron el humor digesto
para poder hacer la evacuación
que por falta de éste no se hizo. Y
porque ya me parece que me voy
alargando, quiero resumirme con
que el día de hoy hay pocos
médicos que verdaderamente lo
sean, y muchos que tienen los
nombres de médicos que no lo
son, porque tienen el nombre
sólo, sin las obras; y no hay
menos necesidad de que en esto
se pusiese remedio que en lo de
los boticarios, no dexando curar
sino á las personas que fuesen
suficientes para ello y que
tuviesen todas las partes y
condiciones que se requieren
para no matar á los enfermos en
lugar de sanarlos.
Pimentel.—Conforme á eso,
¿queríades que los médicos
fuesen tan perfetos que todas sus
obras fuesen sin reprehensión?
Dionisio.—Yo querría lo que
Galeno dice que conviene á los
médicos (así como antiguamente
está dicho) ser semejantes á los
ángeles, para que no yerren en lo
que hicieren.
D. Gaspar.—Mucha medicina
habéis estudiado, á lo que
parece, señor Dionisio, pues
tantas autoridades y de tantos
autores traéis para probar vuestra
intención contra los médicos.
Lerma.—Aquellas tiénenlas
estudiadas y recopiladas muchos,
días ha, para satisfacerse de los
médicos que dixeren alguna cosa
de los boticarios, aunque no
puedo dexar de confesar que
Dionisio tiene tanta habilidad que
basta para más que esto, y en
todo lo que ha dicho dice muy
gran verdad y tiene razón, porque
son todas cosas convenientes y
necesarias; y verdaderamente es
mucho el daño que hacen los
médicos que no son suficientes ni
tienen la habilidad que se
requiere para usar bien sus
oficios, de las cuales es la mayor
la arte y después la experiencia, y
con ellas se ha de juntar el buen
natural, la discreción y la buena
estimativa para conocer y juzgar y
obrar con la calidad y cantidad, y
guardar los tiempos, las
condiciones, diferenciando con el
buen juicio la manera que se ha
de tener en las curas, que
requieren diversas formas y
maneras para ser curadas; y
conforme á esto, los médicos,
para ser buenos médicos, si fuese
cosa que se pudiese hacer,
habrían de ver curar cuando
mozos y curar cuando viejos y
experimentados.
Pimentel.—Lo que yo infiero de
lo que ha dicho Dionisio y de lo
que vos, señor licenciado, decís,