The Winter's Tale to him in a dream and bade him name the girl Perdita. He leaves a fardel (a bundle) by the baby containing gold and other trinkets which suggest that the baby is of noble blood. A violent storm suddenly appears, wrecking the ship on which Antigonus arrived. He wishes to take pity on the child, but is chased away in one of Shakespeare's most famous stage directions: "Exit, pursued by a bear." (It is not known whether Shakespeare used a real bear from the London bear-pits, or an actor in bear costume.) Perdita is rescued by a shepherd and his
Exit the King plays, the stage is filled with more and more objects or characters; in "Rhinoceros", for example, there are gradually more and more rhinoceroses. In this play, however, the kingdom and all the characters slowly disappear. Likewise, the language is generally more straight forward and comprehensible, eschewing Ionesco’s tendency toward abundant clichés and nonsense. Ionesco told Claude Bonnefoy in a 1966 interview that "Exit the King" did not "originate in a dream" as many of his plays did, but was "much more consciously composed. People immediately said: 'Oh! He’s given up the avant-garde, he’s turning classical!' It wasn’t a question of