‘The subject of this print, ‘Take that, you dog’, generally is interpreted as friars ‘curing’, with an enormous injection, a man (perhaps King Carlos IV?) who has been cuckolded by his wife. This idea is sustained by the ending of the Biblioteca Nacional's text: ‘...The woman seen at the back, covered with a veil, and a monster with enormous horns presides over this scene authorizing everything for our Father Prior’. The ‘horned monster’ (far more evident in the drawing for this subject at the Prado), a sign of cuckolding, would appear to make clear the general subject of this scene. The depictions of the actions of the Friars, however, could be construed as an attack against them by Goya. In addition, the phrase Trágala, although it appears to be a command form of the verb tragar (‘to swallow’, but also ‘to pocket an affront’), also could be the one word trágala (admittedly with an accent over the first ‘a’) which in the Spanish-English dictionary of Velazquez de la Cadena of 1852 refers to as ‘a song of the liberals against the absolutists which began with this word’. ‘Liberals against the absolutists’ in 1798 could equal Jovellanos (appointed a Minister in November, 1798 but thrown out nine months later), that great liberal of his time, against the absolutism of the monarchy or simply that of the Queen's lover Manuel Godoy. In these same specific or more general contexts, there also could be considered the phrase: Cantarle uno el trágala which the 1852 dictionary (see above) translates as: ‘To crow over one who has to accept what he detested’. Finally, Goya perhaps is himself not sure of the final meaning of the work and wishes us to make our own judgement.’

Johnson, R. S., Francisco Goya, Los Caprichos, R.S. Johnson Fine Art, Chicago, 1992, p. 142.