Are You There with Your Bears?

And I’m not talking about the kind of bears you met in that night-club the other night, you lucky thing. I’m talking fruit-and-nut enthusiast, grizzly, pandering, polar-explorer bears. The kind of bears that take their sleep schedule seriously, like picnic baskets and marmalade and yellow checked trousers with matching scarf and just love the way ants tickle on your tongue. The kind of bear you can call silly and old and he’ll still bring you a pot of honey for your birthday, that says ‘Wocka wocka wocka’ because otherwise how will people know the jokes have happened? Yes that’s right, Shakespeare worked with these kinds of bear, and bears are a healthy antidote to our often automatic veneration of Shakespeare. Though he often gets treated as a vital part of human literary culture, Shakespeare is not a bear necessity, because why have Shakespeare when you could have nuts, berries or salmon?

In an early modern play, John Lyly’s Mother Bombie, one character turns to another and asks, ‘Are you there with your bears?’ The character speaking is thought to be a bit weird, and this question is part of the way the play presents her as odd, but it is nonetheless a very good question. Are you there with your bears: a question that changes its meaning depending on where you put the emphasis (and prompts further questions about who ‘you’ is, why they have bears and where ‘there’ might be). The phrase seems to capture something about the forgotten social life of England: as the Box Office Bears project has been discovering, people really did appear suddenly in your town with their bears.

This has been one of the major finds of the BOB project so far: bears were much more present in sixteenth-century England than previously suspected. Shakespeare’s most famous performance venue, the Globe, was built in an area so well-known for its bears, it was called the Bear Garden, so that Shakespeare and the Globe appear amidst the arenas, fields and shelters devoted to bear display. Southwark might almost be thought of as London’s bear park, somewhere you could stroll and be amongst the sights, sounds and smells of bears. This meant going to Southwark allowed you to choose between what now seem to many of us to be completely different kinds of entertainment. Do you want to see someone like Hamlet (for example) get spooked by a ghost, talk some smack to the audience and be horrible to everybody onstage (pretty sure that’s the plot of Hamlet, apologies for the spoilers)? Or do you want to go watch bears?

And, perhaps most importantly, you could go to this area and choose neither theatre nor animals, whilst also having an afternoon out which was all about both of these things. We talk of people going to the theatre, but maybe that’s the wrong preposition for this kind of activity. In sixteenth-century London, people perhaps went at or near or next to the theatre, they aimed for their general direction and it didn’t much matter if they got there or not. The theatres and animal arenas were magnets not just for their own audiences, but for people who just wanted to be in the spaces around them, to be there with their bears and performers. The wider footprint of these various performance spaces was the key draw, a space for leisure, meandering, being amongst strangers committed to the same pursuit, somewhere you could hear the sounds of theatre and animals without actually having to pay for several hours of spectatorship. They were spaces of ambience, socialising and excitement and didn’t need to involve committing yourself to the specifics of storytelling and show offered by theatres or arenas. The theatres and arenas were hang-out zones, even and especially for those who never went inside them.

Outside London, as we have seen, people toured the country with their bears, but BOB has also been discovering that many towns across the country had their own local bears as well as venues devoted to their display. As our very own project bear, Bob, discovered in our first film, these venues were often called the Bear Inn, and yes, the bears were in. Bears stopped traffic in this period, causing traffic jams, and I am sorry to tell you that bear dung was a sufficient nuisance to make legal authorities intervene to force owners to, well, clean up their act. Basically you couldn’t move for a bear in Tudor England.

Have we got our heads around this proximity of Shakespeare to bears? Shakespeare’s working life happened with, in the midst of, right next door to bears. Shakespeare was there with his bears. What does it mean to bring these things together, and why does it often surprise us, given that Shakespeare and bears were together all along?

Shakespeare’s life amongst the bears doesn’t make much immediately visible impact on his work, and this is generally true of other contemporary documents, literature and art. Such texts and images are almost totally silent about the presence of bears in everyday culture, making bears a vital part of a lost sixteenth-century oral tradition, one which BOB is working to rediscover.

But Shakespeare does sometimes mention animals: who could forget that moment in Hamlet where he tries to count two bees but can’t quite do it? Likewise, bears receive occasional, tantalising mention in Shakespeare. Both Macbeth and King Lear‘s Gloucester compare themselves to bears as they are hounded by adversaries, and Jason Scott-Warren has suggested that the Malvolio plot in Twelfth Night is in effect a bear-baiting aimed at a human.

But Shakespeare’s most direct reference to a bear does not occur in the stage dialogue nor in his dramaturgical structures. It is often said that his most famous stage direction is ‘Exit pursued by a bear‘, and it’s famous precisely because, woah, bear. But the surprise here isn’t just the bear itself, but also the way it appears at the end of this stage direction. Nothing in the play script has much prepared us for anything beyond ‘Exit pursued by some sort of human’. And even more surprisingly, it’s the play’s only stage direction devoted to the bear. This is an exit, then, without an entrance, by which I mean it is a scripted call for an exit which has omitted to make what you might otherwise think is the rather necessary preliminary call for an entrance. What comes up must come down, but for Shakespeare’s one direct demand for a bear, what comes down has somehow forgotten to come up. If I was the stage manager for this play, I would be like, ‘Oh, you want a bear onstage at this point, William? Would have been helpful to know a bit before, tbh’.

As Box Office Bears uses archaeological evidence, DNA analysis and literary and historical documents to try to centre Tudor England’s often elusive bears, this stage direction is a good metaphor for our work and the evidential state of play. The bear in A Winter’s Tale gets no entrance: it appears in the text only as it leaves the stage, its presence only indicated because of its absence. Captured in the act of exiting, the bear is an afterthought, a momentary stage effect, the decoration for somebody else’s exit. Granted a transitory stage direction, it isn’t even the main subject in the grammar of its one moment: it isn’t ‘The bear exits‘, but ‘A human should Exit pursued by some random bear that I have otherwise forgotten to mention, lol’.

In other words, even though the stage direction is now famous because of its bear, the bear doesn’t even get to star in its own stage direction. If I was Shakespeare, I would write an earlier stage direction that says ‘The bear comes onstage and does bear things, it is now bear o’clock‘. I would call this play The Play with the Bear In It, Wow. It’s precisely the casual, nonchalant, almost haphazard reference to the bear that makes the stage direction so striking. It’s belated, it’s secondary, as incidents go it is surprisingly incidental. The playwright calls for a massive stage effect (‘SURPRISE THEM WITH BEAR’), but does so in oddly hushed, almost secretive terms. The bear is big and small, the bear is important and unimportant all at once. It is not at all clear if we are there with our bears. That fleeting reference to a bear tells us a lot about the real and imaginary spaces bears occupied for Shakespeare’s contemporaries.

Because Shakespeare has been elevated to some sort of literature-philosophy mega-god by the intervening centuries, early modern drama has come to be seen as wordy, worthy, self-evidently high-status and high-quality. The presence of bears alongside Shakespeare helps us to remember that both human and animal performance in this period was an entertainment business, noisy, visceral, violent, bloody, cruel, exploitative, kinetic, silly and potentially deadly for both performers and audience. Humans and animals gave their audiences action and spectacle, but they didn’t always do so using words. Whatever a playscript might have you believe with its misleading and seemingly formative words, early modern performance often turned on non-verbal storytelling.

Both human and animal performance involved words and texts of various kinds, of course, but neither of them were as word-focused or word-based as their historical documents (themselves made up of words written onto animal skins) have come to suggest. Shakespeare was there with his bears, and if you follow Box Office Bears’ work, you can be too. Bears have disappeared from our view of English history because they fall into the gaps between the many different ways we study and think about the past. Join us as we bring together archaeology, ancient DNA, literature, performance and historical documents and look for ways for bears to tell us their stories themselves.