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Friday, July 24, 2026

"Shakespeare, Shaken and Stirred," at Lily Books Aug. 7

Posted by Grace Tiffany at 4:03 PM

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A Beachin' Novel about the Gunpowder Plot

“A consistently compelling read from beginning to end .... showcases author Grace Tiffany as an extraordinarily gifted storyteller of the first order." --James Cox, Midwest Book Review. "Rich and vivid detail . . . Provides readers with some complex thoughts on the role of religious terrorism throughout history.” – Historical Novel Society. (Click on image to order GUNPOWDER PERCY.)

Grace Tiffany

Grace Tiffany is a Shakespeare scholar who likes to make things up. She's not the only one of those, but she has a novel approach. Her newest work of fiction, THE OWL WAS A BAKER'S DAUGHTER, chronicles the trials of Shakespeare's youngest -- now a seasoned woman in her 60s -- during the English Civil War. Her last novel, GUNPOWDER PERCY, was published in 2016 by Bagwyn Books.

Expert Editorial

Need beta readers for your fiction? Click on image. Copyediting, proofreading, internal consistency, grammar.

Has Shakespeare Gone Postal?

Vintage Postage-Stamp Jewelry by Beth Crook-Derdivanis

The All-Male Propeller Company stages TWELFTH NIGHT in Ann Arbor, Michigan, February, 2013

The Shakespeare Coat of Arms

About Me

Grace Tiffany: is a Shakespeare scholar and a novelist. She writes and teaches in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

View my complete profile

Shakespeare's "The Tempest," critical edition

Shakespeare's "The Tempest," critical edition

Click on image for more about this edition

Approaches to Teaching "Shrew"

Approaches to Teaching "Shrew"

Ed. M. Dupuis and G. Tiffany

PAINT

A novel based on the life of Emilia Lanier

Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny

Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny

By Grace Tiffany. Click on image for more about this book.

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The On-Stage Bear

"Exit pursued by a bear," at act 3, scene 3, line 58 of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Directors have long entertained themselves solving the problem of how old Antigonus is to be chased off stage by a bear in this wilderness scene. The puzzle is mixed up with the question of whether this pivotal moment midway through the tragicomedy is tragic, or comic. The modern stage has used wheeled mechanical bears, shadow bears (see above), and actors in bear suits designed with varying degrees of realism. When my students staged this scene, one of them ran in with a puppet Winnie the Pooh and chased Antigonus out of the classroom. Perhaps, in this play deeply concerned with the seasonal cycle of death and rebirth (Antigonus doesn't outrun the bear, but the baby he's left in the wild survives), the best stage solution was the shaman bear, a man in Plains Indian garb and bearskin hood, who entered the stage in one American production and departed with Antigonus, hand in hand and both dancing to the beat of a drum.
What did Shakespeare and his fellows do for a bear? Something scarier, in my imagination. I describe it in Will, chapter 39. By the way, scholars have recently argued that Shakespeare had a hand in the early seventeenth-century play Mucedorus partly on the grounds that it also contains a chasing bear.
People love this stage direction. There's a theater collaborative in New York called "Exit Pursued by a Bear," and Zazzle sells T-shirts bearing (sorry) the stage direction. A nice discussion of the theatrical bear problem can be found in the "stage history" section of Lawrence Rhu's edition of The Winter's Tale (Wadsworth-Cengage, 2012).

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