GR translation: wheeling his bicycle

[alice wellintown]

These early episodes of GR are loaded with allusions to the psychology
of sex and to Shakespeare's plays. _Othello_ is Shakesppeare's deepest
and widest exploration of the psychology of sex. In his Introduction
to the Arden, Honigmann says that _Othello_ is an "extraordinary
advancement towards realism" and that Shakespeare seems to have been
influenced by Rabelais. Iago, Honigmann maintains, "might be called
Rabelaisian, with the proviso, that the Frenchman keeps at a joky
distance from uro-genital events and Iago seems as if mesmerized by
them, their slave and not their master" (49).  Honigmann notes that
the play closest to _Othello_ in its preoccupation with sex is
_Troilus and Cressida_, and Chaucer's Pandare, a voyeur who
manipulates the sex drive of others, perhaps also gave Shakespeare
ideas for Iago.

The unforgettable phrase, "the beast with two backs" is a French
proverb that Shakespeare may have known from _Gargantua_.  The
"surprize" that Iago slips into the menu is the "old black ram
tupping the white ewe." Is this a surprise to the father of the white
ewe? His daughter,  at 13 or 14 is "covered by a Barbary horse of 45
or 50. The exotic setting, the pleasure palace for sexual tourists,
the miscegenation, the homosexual and master slave rigidities of class
in collapse as war unwinds.And Jessica says,  But what about the
girls?

> Does this mean that Pudding fancies the fishmonger's son, the meat
> substitute thing is just a ruse, and the evening's menu will include roast
> beast with two backs?