A rectangular drawing of a plane graph is a drawing whose nodes are points, edges are vertical or horizontal lines, and regions are all rectangles. The best previously known compact representation of an m-edge rectangular drawing, due to Yamanaka and Nakano, requires at most 5m/3 bits. The encoding and decoding of their compact representation can both be done in O(m) time. We improve the required number of bits to at most 1.53m+10.83 without increasing the time required for encoding and decoding.