The Winter's Tale play contains one of the most famous Shakespearean stage directions: "Exit, pursued by a bear", presaging the offstage death of Antigonus. It is not known whether Shakespeare used a real bear from the London bear-pits, or an actor in bear costume. The Royal Shakespeare Company, in one production of this play, used a large sheet of silk which moved and created shapes, to symbolise both the bear and the gale in which Antigonus is travelling. One comic moment in the play deals with a servant not realising that poetry featuring references to dildos is vulgar, presumably from not knowing what
Exit...Stage Left a part of the official "12 Months of Rush" promotion. The high definition master prepared for this release was also made available for purchase in a 24-bit/48 kHz digital format at several high-resolution audio online music stores. These remasters have significantly less dynamic range compression than the 1997 remasters and the "Sector" remasters by Andy VanDette. Sean Magee remastered the audio from an analog copy of the original digital master, using a 192 kHz sample rate. But since "Exit... Stage Left" was originally mixed on digital equipment at 16-bit/44.1 kHz, no audio above 22 kHz exists in the original digital