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
The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First Niobe. While scholars are not sure whether Christopher Marlowe's "Edward II" or Peele's "Edward I" was written first, there is general agreement that one play influenced the other. The stage direction of Mortimor with the head appears to be a reflection on the end of "Edward II", in which Mortimer's own head is brought to the newly crowned Edward III ten lines before the end of the play. Hook describes the stage direction as "surely wrong, but it comes with a grim, though unintentional, humor." (The immediately following line has Gloucester comment on Jone's teeth.) "How it happened to be