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 Ghost results. The older Zuckerman, though not pleased, was more philosophical and was able to place the results into a more historical context. The stage direction, "exit ghost" appears in three of William Shakespeare's plays: "Hamlet", "Macbeth" and "Julius Caesar". In a BBC interview, Roth stated that using this direction as a title "came to me because of "Macbeth". Last year in the summer I was going to see a production of "Macbeth" here in America, and I re-read the script that afternoon, and I came upon the Banquo scene, ghost scene, and it just leaped out — 'exit ghost' —