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
Play Without a Title the English-language translator of the play, argues that it differs in important respects from many of Lorca's other works, insofar as it attempts a series of transgressions of the traditional boundary separating stage from auditorium. The play tackles "issues of class and ideological division, of intolerance and hatred, all of them acted out in a theatre where the actors are as much the audience as the audience the actors." Lorca's experiments in this direction echo the work of Pirandello (whose "Six Characters in Search of an Author" (1921) attempted to stage a similar transgression), though Lorca develops the effect in