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
All the world's a stage long predated Shakespeare. Juvenal, the ancient Roman poet, wrote one of the earliest versions of this line in his “Satire 3”: “All of Greece is a stage, and every Greek’s an actor.” Richard Edwards' play "Damon and Pythias", written in the year Shakespeare was born, contains the lines, "Pythagoras said that this world was like a stage / Whereon many play their parts; the lookers-on, the sage". When it was founded in 1599 Shakespeare's own theatre, The Globe, may have used the motto ' (All the world plays the actor), the Latin text of which is derived from a 12th-century