Opposing the notion that early modern plays and playwrights are ‘spatially insensitive’, Tim Fitzpatrick's carefully researched and powerfully argued book sets out to demonstrate ‘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’ (pp. 1–2). One of the book's most important claims is that the standard configuration for the early modern stage was to have only two doors, and thus that the ‘place in the middle’ – the place occupied, for example, by Volpone when spying on his gulls, or by Polonius when he is ratted out by Hamlet – did not offer access to the tiring house. This is a contention which has already pitted Fitzpatrick against other students of early modern theatres (most notably Andrew Gurr), and it is on this ‘two-door’ contention that his book's key thesis hinges: in arguing that most early modern dramas were composed on the assumption that they would, in performance, be employing a two-door system (an argument supported by his suggestion that ‘discoveries’ were made from the doors, rather than the centre), Fitzpatrick is able to analyse the ‘straightforward yet sophisticated’ spatial dynamics that prevailed on the Shakespearean stage (p. 1). He shows, to my mind convincingly, that the basic system consists of one door that leads ‘inwards’, and another door that leads ‘outwards’, and that the stage space itself is therefore to a great extent defined by its relation to what lies offstage – for example, the sense of a hallway will be conjured up by having one door that leads inwards (to a bedroom), and another that leads outwards (to a street). The crucial insight, here, is that the playwright encodes these structures in his text – and it is in textual evidence that Fitzpatrick grounds his argument. As he points out, the operation of this simple yet flexible system also indicates the extent to which meaning, in the early modern playhouses, was created through the collaboration of playwrights, players and play-goers: the latter came to appreciate and interpret the spatial codes established by the former.

Analyses of individual scenes (in particular Macbeth's ‘Porter’ scene) are skilfully handled, and Fitzpatrick assembles his copious evidence intelligently and cogently, providing tables, appendices and simple but well-devised diagrams. Though deeply interested in the physical reality of the theatre, this is not simply a book about theatre design: it is a book about how playwrights tell stories in space and time. Clear in its aims but far-reaching in its ambitions, it makes a significant contribution to the study of the early modern stage.