CS Knowledge Base

"Exit, pursued by a bear", earlier "Exit pursued by a Beare", is a stage direction in act three, scene three of The Winter's Tale, a play by William Shakespeare. It precedes the offstage death of the character Antigonus, who is killed by the bear. The direction is infamous for its difficulty in staging and unintentional comedy. The American Shakespeare Center described the phrase as "Probably the most famous Shakespearean stage direction of all time, at once hilarious and perplexing to modern audiences".^[1]

The direction has been executed in various ways by different productions of the play. The bear has been portrayed in costume, as a puppet, as a projected shadow, and as a projected computer animation. It has been theorized that early productions used a real live bear, although this is rejected by contemporary scholarship.^[2] Bears are unreliable and difficult to train, and there is no historical evidence of live bears ever having been used in Elizabethan era theatre.^[3] The audiences of Shakespeare's London were familiar with bears, which were featured in public spectacles and circuses.^[4][5]

Actor David Tennant expounded on the dilemma of staging "Exit, pursued by a bear" on the BBC's Just a Minute, listing a puzzlement of options for theatre directors, including putting an actor in a fuzzy bear suit ("or does that puncture the drama of the moment?"), or taking an expressionistic approach such as a sound or light effect.^[6]

• Cultural depictions of bears
• Bear-baiting

• Gurr, Andrew (Winter 1983). "The Bear, the Statue, and Hysteria in The Winter's Tale". Shakespeare Quarterly. 34 (4): 420–425. doi:10.2307/2869858. JSTOR 2869858.
• Quilligan, Maureen (2016). "Exit Pursued by a Bear: Staging Animal Bodies in The Winter's Tale". In Traub, Valerie (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Embodiment. Oxford University Press. pp. 505–522. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199663408.013.29. ISBN 978-0-19-966340-8.
• Thomson, Leslie (March 2000). "Shakespeare and the Art of Making an Exit". University of Toronto Quarterly. 69 (2): 540–559. doi:10.3138/utq.69.2.540. ISSN 0042-0247.
• Wagoner, David (December 2012). "Exit, Pursued by a Bear: —Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale". The Hopkins Review. 5 (1): 68. doi:10.1353/thr.2012.0003. ISSN 1939-9774.
• "Exit, Pursued by a Bear". TV Tropes.