ABSTRACT
This book attempts to articulate and exemplify what the author believe was a straightforward yet sophisticated sense of space and place in early modern performance, a sense of place that means that the direction of the Gentlewoman's exit is important, and that have every reason to laugh if a production makes a nonsense of it. It argues that there was a set of shared conventions about how the doors and other resources on the early modern stage were used to signify spatial relations in performance, and that these conventions are recoverable from the play texts. The book begins in what is perhaps a deceptively simple manner, by discussing straightforward spatial patterns in some well known Shakespearean texts. A relational spatial system such as that which this analysis suggests has a number of different potentials for understanding of early modern performance. The book argues its possible relevance in terms of the pragmatic organization of performance.
