Ben Jonson’s Doors

hen Thomas Dekker, in his 1609 prose pamphlet The Gull’s Hornbook, describes how gallants should behave in the fashionable aisles w of St. Paul’s Cathedral, he encourages them to pay special attention to the doors: “first observe your doores of entrance, and your Exit; not much unlike the plaiers at the Theaters.” In noting how important doors of entrance and exit are to actors, Dekker is surely drawing on his own experience as a playwright. He may also have a more specific theatrical door in mind. Ben Jonson’s 1599 Every Man Out of His Humour includes a direct precursor to Dekker’s satirical look at behavior inside St. Paul’s, and this extended sequence, taking up the play’s third act, has its characters return again and again to the cathedral’s west door, a notorious site for the posting of advertisements. I propose that the attention lavished on this door is emblematic of Jonson’s dramaturgy. While “the plaiers at the Theaters” always needed to observe their entrances and exits, Jonson exploited the possibilities of the stage doors more consistently and creatively than any other period playwright. The crowded streets of London increasingly appear, in his plays, positioned offstage and out of sight. In turning to indoor settings, Jonson shows how control of doors allows for a larger mastery of urban space. For Jonson as playwright, this mastery extends into the theater itself. Inside the walls of a theater, characters and audience share an enclosed space, and Jonson uses this potentially claustrophobic situation to heighten both the comic energy and the antagonistic tensions that pass through the doors.