Exit, pursued by a...what?

It's Shakespeare's most (in)famous stage direction: "Exit, pursued by a bear." The stage direction appears in Act III, Scene III and marks the death of the character Antigonus as well as the transition between the courtly and pastoral worlds of A Winter's Tale. But the strangeness of this stage direction means that it is not only memorable, it's also notoriously difficult to stage. Modern productions have taken various routes, most of which use new theatrical technologies such as projections, mechanized puppets, or digital sound effects. But how might "Exit, pursued by a bear" have been stage in its original performance? We will explore in this post four possible contemporary stagings of this iconic bear. All of these are theories––while some seem more probable than others, no one has yet found a source (an audience member's written reaction to the play, a registry entry of props specific to A Winter's Tale, or the like) to rule in or rule out any of these possibilities.

Option 1: Actor in a bear suit

This is the most obvious of the options, and it has the bonus of being the safest from a practical perspective. We know that the Lord Admiral's Men, a rival theatrical company to Shakespeare's The King's Men, owned bear skins and used them as costume pieces in the late 16th century. The first recorded performance of A Winter's Tale took place in 1611, giving The King's Men plenty of time to obtain a bear suit of their own even if the Lord Admiral's Men would not lend one to them. 

Option 2: Drugged bear

The English early moderns enjoyed the spectacle of bear-baiting, a form of entertainment where a bear was tied to a stake and then attacked by dogs in a lethal fight for public viewing. One venue where such spectacles took place, The Bear Garden, was close to The Globe Theatre (where A Winter's Tale was performed), suggesting that it would have been possible to drug a bear from the Garden and lead it to the Theatre to appear onstage during the performance. The Jacobeans had common recipes for drugs and sedatives such as dwale (made from hemlock and opium, among other ingredients) that would have made this option safer for the actor playing Antigonus.

Option 3: Baby polar bear

While most scholars still believe that the Winter's Tale bear was a human actor in a bear suit, there is some fairly compelling evidence to suggest that it may have actually been a baby polar bear. Just weeks before the first performance of A Winter's Tale in 1611, three baby polar bears arrived at the court of King James as a present for the monarch. They were entrusted to the care of Edward Alleyn and Philip Henslowe, who operated The Bear Garden. Shakespeare might very well have had access to these animals, either through the King himself (remember, Shakespeare wrote for The King's Men) or through Alleyn and Henslowe, who were known to operate and invest in theaters as well as bear-baiting arenas. The exoticism of a baby polar bear would certainly have appealed to contemporary English audiences. As the bears were still very young at the time of the performance of A Winter's Tale, they would have also been considered relatively safe to be on stage with the actor playing Antigonus.

Option 4: Bear puppet

The puppet is a theatrical device that many of today's productions use in their stagings of the Winter's Tale bear. We know that full puppet plays were performed for the London public as early as 1600, so puppet theater was an established practice by 1611. Shakespeare must have been aware of puppets as theatrical devices because he refers to them metaphorically in his plays––including A Winter's Tale, in which Autolycus reveals that he used to be a puppeteer (IV.3.101-2). Some say that Shakespeare's metaphorical references, which use the puppet to express manipulation, demonstrate a negative view of puppet theater and then extrapolate that Shakespeare would not have intended the use of a puppet in performance of his plays. However, we use the same puppet metaphor today and still use puppets in our theater, so this attitude towards puppets does not exclude the possibility of using one to stage the bear.

How have you staged the bear, or seen it staged? Leave us a comment below!

John Massey Wright's watercolor of the famous stage direction of A Winter's Tale:
"Exit, pursued by bear"
Photo credit: Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.