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This article examines the meaning of stage directions from act three, scene three of William Shakespeare's 'The Winter's Tale', in which Antigonus is directed to 'exit, pursued by a bear'. The author suggests that the bear can be understood when read in the context of maternity and child rearing as central concerns of the play, tracing the common use of bears to romances which included tales of foundlings and had folkloric connections with nurturing and shaping children, and is compared with the influence of the women characters in this play to influence their children.

In October 1998 the Italian director Pino DiBuduo visited the Newark, New Jersey, campus of Rutgers University on the occasion of the major international conference, 'Arts Transforming the Urban Environment'. For the occasion, he transformed a bleakly concrete teaching block on the Newark campus into a site for the latest of his Invisible Cities projects. These had originated in his Teatro Potlach company's residency in the Italian village of Fara Sabina in 1991, where DiBuduo's intention - as in a number of site-specific variations on Invisible Cities since - was to render 'visible' aspects of the everyday urban environment which we no longer have the imagination or the patience to 'see'. While Deborah Saivetz looks also at this original Italian project, and at a later version in Klagenfurt, Austria, she concentrates here on the Newark production, whose development she recorded -in this opening article in her own and DiBuduo's words, and in the following piece through the experiences and recollections of the participants. Deborah Saivetz holds a doctorate in Performance Studies from Northwestern University, and is currently Assistant Professor of Theater in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the Newark campus of Rutgers University. Her directorial work includes productions for the New Jersey Shakespeare Festival, the Drama League of New York's Directors' Project, New York's Alchemy Courthouse Theater, and the Parallax Theater Company in Chicago. She has also worked with JoAnne Akalaitis as assistant director on John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore at Chicago's Goodman Theatre, and created original theatre pieces with Chicago's Industrial Theater and Oxygen Jukebox.

Philip Prowse, a designer who produced Oscar Wilde's play 'A Woman of No Importance' for Royal Shakespeare Company and directed some of Wilde's plays in the 1980s, feels that 'A Woman of No Importance' has the best story of all Wilde's plays and brings out the pattern of Wilde's society exactly. Prowse says that 'An Ideal Husband' is only about politicians and getting emotionally involved in it is difficult.

William Shakespeare and Jean Racine both employed a visual use of language in their plays, despite the fact that most critics see these playwrights as polar opposites. Racine's dramas were less flamboyant than Shakespeare's, and did not incorporate vulgar sub-plots or epic battle scenes. Both dramatists, however, used doors and seating arrangements, stage property and gestures such as kneeling to add a visual language to their works.

Stage directions in the Folio edition of 'Macbeth' suggest a performance venue other than the Globe. A sketch for a production at Whitehall Palace dated to 1635 suggests how Shakespeare's stage directions might have been composed based on performance at the Great Hall in Hampton Court.