Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance: Shakespeare and Company (review)

As its title implies, Tim Fitzpatrick's compendious Playwright, Space and Place in Early Modern Performance offers a detailed analysis of the intricate relationship between Renaissance playwrights and the semiotics of received spatial conventions in theaters like the Globe, the Rose, the Red Bull, the Fortune, and the Cockpit. Building on the work of such scholars as Andrew Gurr, Alan Dessen, Leslie Thompson, Mariko Ichikawa, Bernard Beckerman, and others, the author argues convincingly that most early modern stages had two double doors, each approximately six feet wide, that opened onto the stage and hinged back against the tiring house wall. He posits further that instead of a third door, assumed by some scholars to be centrally located, most of these theaters had a concealment space upstage center, cloaked by a curtain, in which characters could hide temporarily, but without access to and from the tiring house.

Linking his conclusions to an exhaustive survey of over fifty playscripts ranging from Macbeth and King Lear through Cupid's Whirligig, Hengist King of Kent, The Battle of Alcazar, and A Knack to Know an Honest Man, he moves smoothly through three sequential subdivisions: "Onstage and Offstage Resources in Early Modern Performance," "Establishing a Sense of Place and Fictional World," and the somewhat inelegantly titled "A Spatially-Based Stage Management and Meaning-Making System." Based on what Fitzpatrick calls a "triangular division of the fictional world" (195), each theatrical moment is split into three separate areas: "here," "outwards," and "inwards." That is, the stage represents where the action is currently taking place; the first of the two doors usually leads to the outside world; and the other door generally ushers characters into an interior locus such as a study, bedroom, council chamber, or similarly cloistered environment.

Although the author makes concessions based on the extent to which rapid changes of location depend on an audience's ability to "wipe and reset" the spatial connotations of the stage (235), he proceeds to identify the "outwards" and "inwards" binary doors with a number of intriguing symbolic correspondences. Using, for example, Viola's "Then westward-ho!" in Twelfth Night (3.1.134) and Celia's "West of this place" in As You Like It (4.3.78), Fitzpatrick identifies the stage-left door, which usually leads outward, with fictional west, while the stage-right door points inward toward the east, where "Juliet is the sun" (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.3).¹ Similarly, the stage-left "outward" door is most often identified with stereotypical male activity (going off to war, for example), while the stage-right "inward" door, leading frequently to interior domestic spaces, is usually aligned with females. Likewise, he provides evidence that the stage-left door would have reminded audiences of the medieval Hellmouth, while the stage-right door was associated with St. Peter's gate and Heaven ("the elect on the right hand, and the damned, cast into 'outer darkness,' on the left"), thereby identifying the stage-right door with the "high status" locus of "authority, power, and royalty" (222) and designating the stage-left door as the lower-status entrance and exit used more frequently in comic situations.

Sequestered oddly in an appendix, Fitzpatrick's most persuasive point is that "early modern playwrights, actors, and audiences shared a sophisticated sense of space and place in performance" (247). In other words, he postulates that the foregoing staging conventions were well known to the authors of these plays (who wrote their scripts based on this shared global shorthand), but also to the actors (who instinctively knew which entrances and exits to use according to their characters' status in the plays and whether they were making an "inward" or "outward" journey from the "place in the middle") and the audiences (who had been tutored by dramaturgical tradition to recognize and decode such signifiers within their theatrical experiences).

Especially interesting are the author's contentions about the vast size of most early modern stages: the Fortune, for...