The Offstage Death in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale

Arguably Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction throughout his writings, “Exit, Pursued by a Bear,” takes place in The Winter’s Tale as the loyal Antigonus brings Hermoine’s child to the Bohemian coast, seeking for someone to take her in. Antigonus, after setting the child with jewels to ensure that she is found of noble birth, is found fleeing the scene in horror as a bear chases down and eventually kills him.

The bear, as Shakespeare may have intended, acts as a comic relief with the face of dark humor, as an audience is found to erupt in laughter at the sight of a man being killed by a bear. Shakespeare crafts this scene to produce a “relief” of laughter after the past two acts were covered in stress relating to Leontes’ ignorance and Hermoine’s shame in innocence.

In one interpretation, this happening could be employed as a means of dividing the play. Although the character “Time” directly divides the play into past and present, the shocking nature of this occurence could deem memorable enough to the audience to portray the play as “before the bear attack” and “after the bear attack.” The scene also divides at this moment as two men appear and find Hermoine’s child, Perdita, for strings pertaining to Perdita’s uncertain future have been cut, and a life as an unknown born of nobility has begun.

Shakespeare wittingly employs this stage direction to, in an odd sense, combine dark humor with romance and tragedy. The laughability of fictional, ridiculous death was not an art coined by modern generations, as Shakespeare evidently inserts humorous death in The Winter’s Tale.