SOURCE: Pitcher, John. “‘Fronted with the Sight of a Bear’: Cox of Collumpton and The Winter's Tale.” Notes and Queries 41, No. 1 (March 1994): 47-53.

[In this essay, Pitcher uses an account of the staging of Day's Cox of Collumpton to illuminate how Elizabethan audiences might respond to the sight of a bear in Day's play and others.]

The challenge of how to show the bear in Act III of The Winter's Tale continues to put modern directors to the test. Roger Warren, in his account of Sir Peter Hall's production at the National Theatre in 1988, reports that Hall thought that the bear

should be ‘grotesque and take the breath away’ and that ‘we should not look at it for too long’; but in the event his bear appeared in dim light at the back of the stage on its hind legs, enveloped Antigonus in its arms, and dragged him off upstage. It hardly seemed startling enough. Hall said that if the audience laugh, they laugh from shock; here they giggled rather uneasily. …¹

Since then, in three productions in the United Kingdom, one at the Young Vic and two on tour, the bear has been represented (i) by Leontes himself, with a claw and a mitt of skin for his hand and arm, with which he towered over Antigonus, and tore at him; (ii) by an enormous quadrophonic roar of an animal all around the darkened auditorium; and (iii) by a thing like Nosferatu (or perhaps a parody of Nosferatu), a black player with fangs, who erupted from under a giant sheet which had been spread across the stage to signify the beach at Bohemia, and which he billowed into the air and then threw over Antigonus as he devoured him.²

Critics and historians of the theatre have addressed the equally teasing question of who or what the bear might have been in the first performance of The Winter's Tale, but without much success. They have been pretty well stumped by the lack of evidence about bears on the Elizabethan stage, and by a sense that what they should really be attending to are the sophisticated effects Shakespeare was seeking in this scene. The older notion that the bear might have been a real one—perhaps a tame white creature, one of the pair used to pull the chariot in Ben Jonson's court masque Oberon—has not so much been refuted, as put aside because inappropriate to the type of play we now take The Winter's Tale to be.³ Discussion of how Antigonus exited pursued by the bear is now chiefly concerned with the place this scene has in the structure of the play, and what it contributes, through its violent and odd humour, to the shifts in tone, mood, and feeling which transport the audience out of Sicily and the past and into Bohemia and the future. In this context, Dale Randall has even ventured to connect the appearance of the bear to the well-known line in Horace's Epistles II.i, in which stupid and uneducated audiences are criticized for calling for a bear or for boxers right in the middle of a play, media inter carmina poscunt aut ursum aut pugiles. ‘When we consider the complex variety of things that Shakespeare … achieved by means of the bear,’ Randall writes, ‘it is all the more striking that this particular addition to Greene's old story [Pandosto] may be a witty actualization of a passage that many Englishmen of the day had read in Horace.’⁴

Randall also argues that Shakespeare's bear would have been quite a novelty on the Jacobean stage, and that its sudden presence would have broken any illusion of realism which might have been created in the play up to that point. He notes that before The Winter's Tale only three dramatic works are known to have featured a bear. One of these was Locrine, a play written around 1590, the second was Mucedorus, from around the same time (at least one of its bear scenes was added much later, see below), and the other was the masque mentioned before, Jonson's Oberon, which was performed at court on 1 January 1611. Randall concludes that what all of these stage bears have in common, Shakespeare's included, is that their role is ‘anything but realistic. However the passages in which they appear were staged, the minds of their audiences were at once alerted to the mechanics of the staging.’⁵

One bear which Randall does not take note of appears in the lost play, Cox of Collumpton. This was a melodrama written by John Day and William Haughton for Henslowe, who paid them five pounds for it in the winter of 1599.⁶ It is unlikely that the play was ever published. Cox of Collumpton was played at the Rose Theatre by the Admiral's Men in the early spring of 1600, and seen there by the necromancer Simon Forman on Tuesday 4 March. Forman's account of the performance, which he wrote into one of his large manuscript books, provides the only details we have of the play's plot and action. Although a transcript of it was published as early as 1933,⁷ Forman's report of what he saw is not at all well known, which is a pity because the details he records confirm that at this time the very sight of a bear might be expected to have a catastrophic effect upon an individual, especially someone who was doing something dreadfully wrong.⁸ This is the text of Forman's description:

[Jtm in.] the plai of Cox of Cullinton / & his 3 sonns henry peter and Jhon. on S^t markes dai Cox him selfe shote an Arrowe thorowe his vnkells head to haue his Land & had yt and the sam dai 7 yers on m^r Jaruis shot cox throughe the head & slue him. and on saint markes dai a year after his elder sonn henry was drown< e >d by peter & Jhon in his Tan fate. and on S^t markes dai Ag< en > A year After peter & Jhon both slue them sellues for peter be ing fronted w^t the sight of a beare vz a sprite Apering to John & him when they sate vpon deuision of the Landes. in liknes of a bere & ther with peter fell out of his wites and was tyed in a darke house & beat out his brains against a post. & Jhon stabed him self< e > & all on S^t markes dai / & Remember how m^r hammons sonn slue him. & when he was sleying of his father his father entreating for mercy to his sonn could find no m^rcy. whervpon he promised that his sonn should bewray him selfe by laughing & so he did & was executed for yt / 1600 4 march at the Rose⁹

It is quite possible that Cox of Collumpton was based on a real-life series of contemporary murders and suicides, like other plays written for the Rose (and the Globe too),¹⁰ although a brief examination of surviving ballads and ballad titles has not revealed any obvious and sensational story about a notorious Cox family in the West Country.¹¹ Samuel Tannenbaum said of the action of the play, at least as Forman reported it, that ‘a more uninteresting and stupid narrative can hardly be imagined’:¹² nevertheless, it would be useful to know whether this was an instance where real life was in fact even crazier than some fictional sequence of killings which had been dreamt up by the hacks who scribbled plays night and day for Henslowe.

It might be equally instructive if we knew something more about the Mr Hammon who was murdered by his son. Was this part of the play—a subplot which emphasized or threw into relief the breakdown of fraternal feeling in the main plot about Cox and his sons—or did Forman, when he saw the play, simply call to mind the case of an unfeeling but real parricide who had been found out and executed because he could not stop himself from laughing (presumably when he spoke about the murder of his father)? This is an important issue as far as Forman himself is concerned, in terms of his reliability as an eyewitness (in fact the only eyewitness) to performances of three of Shakespeare's late plays, one of which was The Winter's Tale (on this, see below).

According to Forman, the action of Cox of Collumpton was spread over nine years, with its five deaths all occurring on St Mark's Day, 25 April. Cox killed his uncle by shooting him in the head with an arrow, and he himself was shot in the head by Mr Jarvis seven years later to the day. One year after that the eldest son Henry was drowned by his brothers ‘in his Tan fate’, that is, in his tanning vat, and a year on both of the brothers, Peter and John, committed suicide because of some terrifying thing they had seen. The murders within the family were committed in order to inherit land, but it is possible that Mr Jarvis killed Cox for revenge. Peter and John and their father were not punished by the law, as Mr Hammons's son was, but according to a pattern of retribution: it was when there was no one left to avenge Henry's murder that the bear arrived and drove the brothers mad. It appeared to them when they were settling down to divide the land they had got from Henry's death. Forman's syntax becomes a little unsteady at this point, but it seems that Peter lost his wits as soon as he was ‘fronted w^t the sight of a beare’. He was taken off and ‘tyed in a darke house’, one of the ways the Elizabethans handled lunatics (this is what happens to Malvolio in Twelfth Night), and there he beat out his brains against a post. John's suicide was less spectacular—he merely stabbed himself to death—but presumably he too was in a demented state.

The bear itself was not a bear, of course, but rather ‘a sprite’ or a devil in the ‘liknes of a bere’. The audience could see this, but Forman does not make clear whether Peter and John were aware of it too, so we cannot be sure if they went mad because they thought they saw a bear, or because they realized that it was a sprite half-disguised as a bear (that is, a fiend come from hell to punish them for killing their brother). On balance it seems likely that the mere prospect of the bear would have been enough to scare them to death. Bears were feared by the Elizabethans for their ferocity and cruelty, and there were fabulous stories, as with other animals, of how even the sight of one of them could have an extraordinary effect on a human being (a pregnant woman, seeing a bear, was said to have given birth to a monster, and so forth¹³).

On thing is not in doubt, from Forman's description, and that is that the bear was played by an actor dressed as a sprite who was also wearing some form of bear-costume. This could have been managed in several ways on stage (by wearing a bear's head and upper torso with a devil's tail and cloven foot, or by the sprite taking off the bear's skin after the brothers went mad), and it would have presented no difficulty to the Admiral's Men. In Doctor Faustus, for instance, which they were playing at the Rose through the late 1590s, Mephostophilis at one point gives Faustus the beautiful wife he has asked for, but the wife turns out to be a devil dressed in women's clothing.¹⁴ The date of Cox of Collumpton may be important in this respect. In the third edition of Mucedorus, published in 1610, there are additional scenes, in one of which (I.ii) the clown, Mouse, rushes on stage and says that he has just seen a bear:

O horrible, terrible! Was euer poore Gentleman so scard out of his seauen Senses? A Beare? nay, sure it cannot be a Beare, but some Diuell in a Beares Doublet: for a Beare could neuer haue had that agilitie to haue frighted me. …

As Mouse leaves the stage, going out backwards, the Stage Direction reads ‘the Beare comes in, and he tumbles ouer her, and runnes away …’. This scene was not in the second edition of the play, published in 1606, and it is reasonable to suppose that the reference to ‘some Diuell in a Beares Doubtlet’ was added between 1606 and 1610, certainly long after the performance of Cox of Collumpton in March 1600.¹⁵

Our knowledge of which early companies played Mucedorus is not complete, but we do know that the King's Men had acquired the play by 1610, when they performed it at court. This revival was probably intended to amuse and flatter the sophisticated court audience by showing them a popular play which looked so old-fashioned, and artless, and clichéd, that they would be charmed by its naivety, and prompted to laugh at it generously. It is important to keep this in mind when we interpret what Mouse says about his bear being a devil dressed up in a bear suit. The point of the joke is that the clown knows that what he has just seen (and what the audience are about to see, only a few lines later, when it enters and he falls over it) is not a real bear, but an actor pretending to be one. He knows this because no real bear could be as quick on its legs (so it must be an agile player in an animal skin), and also because there have been other occasions when a bear on stage has really been a sprite dressed in a bear outfit.¹⁶

The question which follows from this is whether Mouse is alluding here to one particular play, Cox of Collumpton, or to a tradition, now lost, of playing the bear in the public playhouses. If Mouse were referring to Cox of Collumpton alone, and its singular way of showing a bear, we might expect to have several other allusions to the play, as we do with, say, some of Marlowe's or Shakespeare's plays, or with The Spanish Tragedy. Since this is not the case, it seems at least possible that the bear on the public stage was always a demon in a bear's skin, and that Elizabethan audiences expected the part to be played like this, in the same way that a modern audience at a pantomime knows how the horse will be played, and accepts and even welcomes the convention.¹⁷

This is all the more plausible when we notice what conventions, not to say clichés, there are in the little that Forman tells us about Cox of Collumpton. Cox shot his uncle through the head with an arrow, and presumably this was staged in the way made familiar to us by one of Rafe's entries in Beaumont's satirical play, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (that is, he comes in with a fake arrow sticking out of either side of his head). Peter's suicide—by knocking out his brains against a post—would scarcely have been a novelty at the Rose Theatre: the audience would surely have recalled at once that in Tamburlaine (played at the Rose throughout the 1590s), the imprisoned Bajazeth had done away with himself by bashing out his brains against the bars of his cage.¹⁸ So when the bear appeared, as a sprite in the ‘liknes of a bere’, this too may have been a well-established and familiar piece of playing, at the Rose and elsewhere. If this is the case, Mouse's joke could well be about the custom of playing the bear as a devil even when the play, like Mucedorus, had no need of a devil at all.

Even if we are sceptical that this playing convention ever existed, or had become well-established, Forman's account of Cox of Collumpton has something to tell us about The Winter's Tale. It shows us that in 1600 in the popular theatre the bear was an animal which could be associated with revenge for a crime against the family, and that it could be played like this without any embarrassment or sophisticated knowingness. It is true that Cox of Collumpton gives no sign of being a high tragedy, but equally it does not look like an arty or self-conscious type of play. The bear, when Forman saw it, was surely played straight, as a vision of awfulness which heaven or hell had devised to terrify the brothers into killing themselves. It was an instrument to punish their mad greed and murder with delirium, insanity, and death (the pattern of Old Testament retribution, an eye for an eye). By contrast, five or ten years later, in Mucedorus, the matter of the bear appears to have dwindled into some sort of joke. Formerly, the bear's role had been to frighten the clown and the coward Segasto, and to provide the hero Mucedorus with an opportunity to save the heroine. With the additions after 1606, the role was in danger of shrinking to a smart joke about how an actor might play the animal on stage.

What one has to decide about the bear in The Winter's Tale is where to place it in relation to these two other creatures, one of them an avenging demon in a murder play, the other a witty fiction, newly made for a clever and literate audience. Dale Randall must be right when he says that there was no attempt to play the bear as real in Mucedorus,¹⁹ but nor was there in Cox of Collumpton, so far as we can tell. Realism in the latter must have been concerned, at its best, with the reality of sin, lunacy, and perhaps guilt in the brothers, even though they themselves thought they had seen a real bear. In this respect, the parallel to be drawn first in Shakespeare is from The Tempest rather than The Winter's Tale. When the royal party is stranded and starving on Prospero's island, they are shown a table with a banquet on it. As they approach the food, Ariel descends dressed as a Harpy and tells them that he is an avenging ministger, who had come to punish their sins. Ariel is nothing of the kind, of course (Prospero has stage-managed the whole event), but the Harpy, a female figure from The Aeneid, was a well-known Renaissance emblem of guilt—an emblem which was given objective form for the men of sin, Alonzo, Sebastian, and Antonio. They saw and recognized what they deserved to see—a creature who would take revenge for their crimes against Prospero—even though it was Prospero himself who had devised the whole show.²⁰ This is the sort of ‘reality’, psychological and spiritual, which the writers of even a tuppenny horror play like Cox of Collumpton might aspire to.

In The Winter's Tale, when the bear attacks Antigonus, it may not be a devil in a bear's doublet (although this is not absolutely impossible), but there is still more than a trace of the avenging fiend about it. Perhaps, like the Harpy in The Tempest, the bear gives expression, or animal shape, to the human sins which have been committed in Sicily, and which are about to be committed by leaving Perdita on Bohemia's shore. Its savagery in the wild is a match for that of Leontes in his civilized court (a parallel pointed up if we compare, for instance, the bear ‘dining’ on Antigonus, with Leontes declaring later that eating is a ‘lawful’ art).²¹ Unlike the Harpy, however, the bear does more than threaten retribution. It exacts a price for Leontes' madness and crimes against his wife and children, a price which is paid by Antigonus' death.

It is arguable that Shakespeare makes Antigonus encounter the demon first, and then the bear. As he lays Perdita down, Antigonus describes how a spirit came to him in a dream, which told him what to call the child, and that because of what he was doing to the baby he would never see his wife Paulina again. The spirit looks like Hermione, and he believes that it is her ghost because she has been executed.²² Since this is not so, this is evidently a spirit from somewhere else, either heaven or hell. Perhaps, by contrast with what happens to Peter and John in Cox of Collumpton (and any other contemporary plays which may have had a fiend in the bear), the guilty one here actually sees the devil, or at least the thing which promises him punishment, and then he is fronted with the bear itself. There is not enough evidence to be sure about this, but it would be entirely characteristic of Shakespeare to adapt a piece of traditional playing to new ends: a bear which turns out to be a sprite is changed to a sprite which turns into a bear. In The Winter's Tale, the shock which concludes the business of the bear is certainly a new one. Only Shakespeare's bear, of all the creatures we have considered, really kills and eats a victim, albeit offstage. The wittiness of this episode, discussed extensively by modern critics, is not in doubt, but we ought not to underplay just how strangely horrible and severe the action is, as well as darkly funny.²³

The oddest thing about Forman's account of Cox of Collumpton is that the bear is there at all. When he came to see The Winter's Tale at the Globe eleven years later, in May 1611, he again wrote out details of what he had seen, but this time he omitted the bear altogether. He missed out other things too, including the statue scene, and we need to keep in mind that he was probably interested in more and less at the Globe than we would like him to have been. For one thing, he intended his notes for precepts and warnings to himself, not as a record of Shakespeare, and for another, he was probably looking away at the audience as often as he was watching the action of the play. Forman went to the playhouses to see plays, but also (among other things) to pick up women, which he did with at least some success, and presumably distraction from the plays. All this said, it is difficult to get rid of the niggling feeling, however unjustified, that Forman really ought to have noticed Shakespeare's bear, if he could be bothered a decade earlier to say something about an inferior one from Day and Haughton. Perhaps, though, this is the point: the effect Shakespeare was looking for was more difficult to take in, and needed more attention. There were no coincidences on St Mark's Day, no drowning in a vat, and the bear, while it roared a bit and chased the nobleman, was hardly what you could have seen at the old Rose, a good old-fashioned devil and a player in a bear's hide.²⁴

Notes

1. Staging Shakespeare's Late Plays (Oxford, 1990), 128.

2. The productions were staged by: (i) The English Shakespeare Company, director Michael Bogdanov (tour beginning at the Grand Theatre, Swansea, 24 September 1990); (ii) The Young Vic Company, director David Thacker (at the Young Vic, 5 September-19 October 1991); and (iii) Theâtre de Complicité, director Annabel Arden (tour culminating in performances at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith, April 1992).

3. Some of the older views were summarized briefly in 1963 by the Arden editor, who concluded that ‘the likelihood is that the bear was real since the remark at [III.iii.] 128 [that is, that bears ‘are never curst but when they are hungry’] could only be made by someone with a knowledge of tame bears' (The Winter's Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (London, 1963), 69 n. to line 58.

4. Dale B. J. Randall, “‘This is the chase”: or, the Further Pursuit of Shakespeare's Bear’, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, cxxi (1985), 89-95 (95). The connection with Horace is discussed on pp. 91-2. Dr Henry Woudhusen has suggested to me, privately, the intriguing possibility that the bear in the first act of Wagner's Siegfried may be a distinct memory of the bear in The Winter's Tale.

5. Randall, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, 93.

6. Three payments were made by Henslowe: (1) 20 shillings lent to Haughton on 1 November 1599 ‘in earneste of A Boocke called the tragedie of John cox’; (2) 20 shillings lent to Haughton and Day ‘in carnest of a Boocke called the tragedie of Cox of collinste^r’; (3) 3 pounds received ‘in full’ by Haughton and Day on 14 November ‘for the tragedy of Cox of Collomton’. These entries are on fo. 65 of Henslowe's Diary, ed. R. A. Foakes and R. T. Rickert (Cambridge, 1961), 125-6 (see also the entry on p. 64 (fo. 31^r) for the 20 shillings received by Haughton on 1 November ‘in parte payement of the the [sic] tragedie of John Cox’, presumably the same as (1)). In A Companion to Henslowe's Diary (Cambridge, 1988), 108, Neil Carson tabulates the sum total of five pounds against payments made by Henslowe for other plays at around the same time.

7. The text was transcribed by Samuel A. Tannenbaum in Shaksperian Scraps and other Elizabethan Fragments (New York, 1933), 14, as part of his attack on the authenticity of accounts of performances which Forman reported seeing at the Globe in 1611 (of four plays, among them Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline). Tannenbaum accepted the note on Cox of Collumpton as genuine, but argued that the later accounts were forgeries by John Payne Collier (a view which modern scholarship has overwhelmingly rejected: see E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford, 1930), ii.337-41; S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford, 1975), 214-15; and the Arden edition of The Winter's Tale, p. xxi n. 1).

8. Forman's account of Cox of Collumpton appears to have been noted first in this century in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols (Oxford, 1923), ii.172 n. 2. It was discussed briefly by A. L. Rowse in The Case Books of Simon Forman: Sex and Society in Shakespeare's Age (London, 1976), 26. The account is not mentioned by Ernest L. Rhodes in Henslowe's Rose: The Stage & Staging (Kentucky, 1976); nor in Documents of the Rose Playhouse, ed. Carol Chillington Rutter (Manchester, 1984); nor by Andrew Gurr in Play-going in Shakespeare's London (Cambridge, 1987), although Gurr does discuss Forman's reports of the plays performed at the Globe (108-9). The play is listed as lost in Alfred B. Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975-1700, 3rd edn, ed. Sylvia S. Wagonheim (London and New York, 1989), 72-3, but there is no reference to Forman.

9. MS Ashmole 236, fo. 77^v, Bodleian Library, Oxford. A photofacsimile of the text (the middle third of fo. 77^v) is reproduced as Plate 1 in Tannenbaum, 187. Notes on the text: [1] [Jtm in.]] indented left Cullinton] C written over c; in, three minims, the last dotted [2] Jhon] indented left [5] yt] y dotted [6] on]?for one (Tannenbaum's conjecture) [10] A] blotted [11-12] be ing] be written at the end of a line, ing at the beginning [16] tyed] t uncrossed [19] how] h altered from f or long s [22] find] f?smudged [23] promised] mi, three minims, the last dotted [26] Rose] followed by the astronomical sign for Tuesday

10. On 6 December, three weeks after they had been paid for Cox of Collumpton, Day and Haughton received five pounds from Henslowe for another murder play, The Tragedy of Thomas Merry, or Beech's Tragedy (see Carson, 105), which was licensed for the stage between 10 and 18 January 1600. According to Rutter, 171, this play was ‘no doubt inspired’ by events recounted in the ballad about the murderers Rachel and Thomas Merry who were executed on 6 September 1594 (the ballad was entered in the Stationers' Register two days after the execution: see Hyder E. Rollins, An Analytical Index to the Ballad-Entries (1557-1709) (North Carolina, 1924), 23, entry 175). The murder of Beech, which was even more horrifying than those in Cox of Collumpton, was dramatized in yet another play, the first of the Two Lamentable Tragedies (1601), attributed to Robert Yarington (the authorship and identity of this play is unclear: see the articles listed in The Popular School, ed. Terence P. Logan and Denzell S. Smith (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1975), 274). The most well-known murder play at the Globe was of course The Yorkshire Tragedy, which was based on events which had happened over half a century before the play was written.

11. Cullompton, to use its modern spelling, was and is a small place about a dozen miles north of the city of Exeter. There is nothing about the Cox family or Jarvis in the ballad entries listed by Rollins, nor in The Roxborough Ballads, ed. W. Chappell, 3 vols (London and Hertford, 1871-5), nor in The Bagford Ballads, ed. J. Woodfall Ebsworth, 2 vols (Hertford, 1878). Other sources consulted, but showing no trace of this Cox family: Calendar of Devonshire Wills and Associations, no editor (Plymouth, 1910); O. J. Reichel, Index of Personal and Place Names in the ‘Hundreds of Devon’ (Torquay, 1942); Devon Inventories of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, ed. Margaret Cash (Torquay, 1966); Tudor Exeter: Tax Assessments 1489-1595, ed. Margery M. Rowe (Torquay, 1977). Also consulted was the Guide to the Reports of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts 1911-57, Part II, Index of Persons, 3 vols (London, 1966), but none of the entries under the name Cox suggest any connection with the events in the play.

12. Tannenbaum, 14.

13. ‘And if we may believe Bale, one of Pope Nicholas the Third's concubines, by a seeing of a bear, was brought to bed of a monster’: Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. Holbrook Jackson, 3 partitions (London and Toronto, 1972), i.254.

14. The action is the same in both of the early texts, A (1604) and B (1616). In A, Scene 5, the stage direction after Mephostophilis has promised Faustus ‘a wife in the diuels name’ reads ‘Enter with a diuell drest like a woman, with fier workes’: see Marlowe's Doctor Faustus 1604-1616, ed. W. W. Greg (Oxford, 1950), 196-7. It is well known that among the stage properties which Henslowe made available to the actors, there was ‘j beares skyne’ (The Henslowe Papers, ed. W. W. Greg (London, 1907), 117).

15. The passage from Mucedorus is quoted from The Shakespeare Apocrypha, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (Oxford, 1908), 107. It is the view of Professor G. R. Proudfoot, who is editing Mucedorus for the revised Oxford edition of the Apocrypha, that no bear appears in the first (1598) text of the play. ‘If it does’, Professor Proudfoot writes, ‘then its behaviour is hard to fathom, as it must exit at once, leaving its intended prey, in order to be decapitated by Mucedorus in the tiring house’ (private communication).

16. The reasons for the play's contemporary popularity are examined in the standard article on the play, by George F. Reynolds, ‘Mucedorus, Most Popular Elizabethan Play?’, Studies in the English Renaissance Drama, ed. Josephine W. Bennett, Oscar Cargill, and Vernon Hall Jr (London, 1961), 248-68. Michael Hattaway, in Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London, 1982), 129-40, discusses the characteristics of the play, and its appeal to audiences in the public playhouses as well as at court (popular and courtly tastes in romantic drama may well have overlapped, at least as regards Mucedorus). The evidence and arguments for and against the use of a live bear are reviewed by Reynolds, 259-64.

17. It is possible that there is an allusion to this convention in Ben Jonson's court masque of 1612, Love Restored. Robin Goodfellow (Puck) confesses that he had tried to get in to see the masque by pretending to be ‘an ingineer’ who ‘belong'd to the motions’, but he was prevented by people at the door who, he says, ‘asked me if I were the fighting beare of last yeere, and laught me out of that’. Jonson's Oxford editors interpret this as a reference to an incident in 1612 in which an actor in a bear's skin had been baited and very nearly killed by a gang of butchers who were playing at being dogs: see Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford, 1925-52), vii.379 and x.198 and 535. This incident does seem to be alluded to in Bartholomew Fair, but the joke in Love Restored may well depend on Robin being a goblin or a sprite, whom the porters at the door were teasing because he ought to be dressed in a bear's skin (this puny devil is passing himself off as an ‘ingineer’ now, but we know that last year he was inside the bear at the stake).

18. See the stage directions at V.289 in The Knight of the Burning Pestle, and at V.i.303 in Tamburlaine, Part 1.

19. Even if the bear';s part was performed by a man in these plays, the actor still had the choice of playing the role for ‘real’ (that is, feigning animal behaviour and characteristics, with as much verisimilitude as possible), or for laughs, or to create some unreal, anti-naturalistic effect. Randall's argument, 93, assumes that the last of these was intended. See nn. 3 and 16 above for references to the literature on using a real (that is, a live) bear on stage.

20. The Tempest III.iii.53-82. In the Arden edition (London, 6th edn reprinted with corrections, 1962), Frank Kermode points out the debt to the Aeneid 89, n. on the stage direction at line 52), and remarks that the ‘habitual allegorization of Virgil would make it easy to interpret the Harpies as emblematic of pride, guilt, and avarice’ (169, additional note to p. 89).

21. The Winter's Tale III.iii.105 and V.iii.110-11 (Arden edition).

22. III.iii.16-42.

23. In this scene Shakespeare is also, as G. Wilson Knight puts it, ‘moulding events from his own past imagery. His recurrent association of tempests with rough beasts, especially bears (as at King Lear, III.iv.9-11), is here actualized: the storm starts, the bear appears, and we have a description of shipwreck’ (The Crown of Life (London, 1965), 98).

    Michael D. Bristol has recently remarked that discussions which pose questions like ‘Was it a real bear or a man in a bear suit?’ treat the bear ‘either as a charming divertissement or as yet another instance of bad taste’: ‘In Search of the Bear: Spatiotemporal Form and the Heterogeneity of Economies in The Winter's Tale’, Shakespeare Quarterly, xlii (1991), 145-67 (159). ‘By concentrating on how the bear was actually staged … rather than on why there is a bear at all,’ he continues, ‘these discussions ignore’ its specific function as ‘a marker of spatiotemporal form.’ The reason Bristol gives for the appearance of the bear in The Winter's Tale (drawing on studies by Laroque, and by Gaignebet and Florentin) is its ‘symbolic identification’ with the winter season. The bear ‘is a prognosticator who appears on 2 February to forecast the end of winter weather’. This may be entirely convincing for The Winter's Tale, but it can hardly apply to the bear in Cox of Collumpton, which showed itself to the Cox brothers, not at Candlemas, or Shrovetide, but on 25 April. An interpretation of the bear as a creature of folk custom does offer a compelling insight into The Winter's Tale, but presumably this popular tradition does not have to be thought of as incompatible with the customs and expectations of players and audiences in the popular theatre. There is surely no intrinsic reason to suppose that Jacobean dramatists and their audiences would have been more interested in, or more influenced by, folklore than by the traditions of stage plays, which they had together, as writers and spectators, brought into being. It is difficult to say what we should make of the sprite in the bear appearing on a particular saint's day (St Mark's), on which the murders had taken place too: was it this special day, as much as the coincidence of the date, which impressed Forman?

24. Forman saw The Winter's Tale on 15 May: his notes are printed in Chambers, William Shakespeare, ii.340-1, and in the Arden edition, pp. xxi-ii. One example of his other activities in the playhouse is given by Rowse, 105: on 15 March 1600 he was at the Rose again to see Sir John Oldcastle (by Drayton et al.), and he there ‘picked up a woman whose address he wrote down: Ann Sedgwick alias Catlyn in Aldersgate Street, right against the Cock’. It is just possible that Forman, despite himself, has preserved for us a trace of the sprite out of the bear, rather than in it, in The Winter's Tale. In his account of the performance, he recalled that ‘the rog’ Autolycus ‘cam in all tottered like coll-pixci’, that is, looking like a hobgoblin, a sprite which could assume the form of a colt, but also that of other animals. Perhaps the player who had been in the bearsuit in III.iii returned in IV.ii, when Time permitted, in the quite fiendish shape of Autolycus.