#Exit Pursued by a Bear

[ekjohnston]

Exit, Pursued By A Bear was always going to be my statistical outlier book. People love it so much. It moves them. It makes them feel like things will be okay. Until tomorrow, it's my only contemporary book, yet it remains the most fantasy thing I've ever written.

Pretty Furious isn't like that. I mean, I hope people love it, but it's not as simple as EXIT was. If EXIT is all the easy answers, Pretty Furious is one frustrating question after another, and the girls who are asking don't always get solutions they can work with. It's about being small and knowing the world is a big place. It's about seeing things that are wrong and being told it's not your problem, not that big a deal, or that it's not happening at all. It's wanting to fight and not knowing how. It's about making mistakes so you can learn. It's about finding the tools to grow, and realizing that you can leverage your identity to improve the world.

And it's about friendship. And family. So much family (I do not apologize for the number of characters in this book). It's about the things you try and don't repeat. It's about the things you leave behind and the things you take with you. It's about how you can change even if you decide to stay.

April 16, 2024, bookstores and libraries everywhere, ebook and audiobook too. Stay angry, little Meg. #prettyfurious

[simmyfrobby]

You'd hug a bear if you wouldn't die or get injured

might risk it one day. it’s how i wanna go out. in pursuit of tenderness.

[shakespearenews]

Exit Pursued by a Polar Bear?

Writing in 1611, astrologer Simon Forman provides us with one of our few first-hand glimpses into early modern stagecraft. Incredibly, he talks about seeing The Winter’s Tale, but fails to mention the bear at all, focusing instead on the main action of the play and on Autolycus, a roguish peddler in the play’s second half.1

---

I’ll offer two possibilities.

The first is the more obvious and also most likely: an actor could have dressed as a bear and performed the role. Kiki Lindell makes the observation that Shakespeare chose “the most humanoid of animals : a bear – virtually the only beast that a man in an animal skin can get away with imitating convincingly,” backing her observation up by referring to the “j beares skyne” listed in theatrical manager Philip Henslowe’s 1598 inventory of stage properties. 2  This could have been lent to Shakespeare’s acting company if they did not possess their own.

Moreover, Shakespeare’s bear was not the only one gracing the English stage at this time. In 1610, a revised version of the anonymous c. 1590 play Mucedorus was printed with the addition of a comical interlude wherein a Clown is scared off the stage by a white she-bear. 3  In 1611, the court masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince, included Prince Henry entering while flanked by two white bears. The Winter’s Tale completes this trilogy of ursine theater, making it possible the Bohemian bear may also have been white, both because there seemed to be a trend but also because there seems to have been a costume in circulation.

However, the specificity of the white bear leads to a tantalizing second option. What if the bear was real?

[bodhrancomedy]

There’s a really great post on here about the bear connection in A Winter’s Tale, but I CANNOT FIND IT.

Note: the RSC website bluntly states there wasn’t a bear and is the first thing that comes up if you google it, but they also don’t acknowledge that the Macbeth “Curse” was written by a specific guy in the 1800s either.

God, I wish I still have access to my university login for the journals.

[haveyoureadthisbook-poll]

[britneyshakespeare]

Exit pursued by a beanie baby

[knight-in-sour-armor]

[fandomwarehouse]

I love the idea of everyone trying to get a smooch on Vernon Roche and he's just mcfuckin had it with all this keesy business so he goes back to his man cave.

[mendaxtheliar]

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

Exeunt, pursued by a bear

[allysdelta]

I went to see Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale tonight, and for some reason, it took until I was sitting in the lobby waiting for the theater to open before I realized out loud, "Oh wait, this is the 'exit pursued by a bear' play, isn't it?"

(They played it straight, by the way, with a looming silhouette behind a curtain. People still laughed though, which is what happens when your play contains the most memetic stage direction in all of Shakespeare)

[checkoutmybookshelf]

Where are my former theatre kids at? We are staging this IMMEDIATELY.

[do-you-know-this-play]

[joemerl]

In my ongoing quest to read all the Shakespeare, I've started The Winter's Tale.

Going in, practically the only thing I know is that this is the one with that famous line: "Exit, pursued by a bear."

[infinitelytheheartexpands]

he exits, pursued by a…projection of a bear

[deweydecimalchickens]

Library titles I have misread at first glance

[theoffingmag]

Now, I think I speak for everyone when I say that bears are just so terribly inconvenient. Maybe that isn’t the word most people would use, but it is probably the most accurate in the case of the bear fight in Shakespeare’s A Winter Tale. Right before the bear enters, this fated character is dropping off a baby to die because his master, the king, thinks his wife, the mother of this child, is cheating on him with a rival king, who he is also close friends with. This poor guy had just finished a several-day quest to get to drop off this baby. He had to become, in some ways, the only parent this kid was ever going to have, and he definitely didn’t sign up for this shit. Finally, he had finished this whole ordeal, moments before. No more whiny kid to deal with. Thank god. Then, a bear comes out of nowhere and tries to fight him.

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