Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre

Bill Angus is a Senior Lecturer in English at Massey University, New Zealand. He has written extensively on early modern drama and material culture. His books with Edinburgh University Press include Metadrama and the Informer in Shakespeare and Jonson (2016), Intelligence and Metadrama in the Early Modern Theatre (2018), Reading the Road, from Shakespeare’s Crossways to Bunyan’s Highways (2019), co-edited with Lisa Hopkins, and his last monograph, A History of Crossroads in Early Modern Culture (2022). His latest edited collection Poison on the Early Modern English Stage, co-edited with Kibrina Davey and Lisa Hopkins, was published in 2023.

• Acknowledgements Introduction: Errant Intelligence: The Devil’s Own 1. ‘Subtle sleights’: Amity and the Informer in Damon and Pithias 2. The Parasites of Machiavel 3. The Knight of the Burning Pestle and the Menace of the Audience 4. The Reluctant Informer: Humanising the Beast 5. Metadrama and the Murderous Nature of Authority 6. The Burning Issue: Metadrama and Contested Authority in Chettle’s HoffmanConclusion: No-one Is There: Ubiquity and Invisibility

Angus offers a subtle and sophisticated exploration of how early modern plays’ staging of informers allows them to interrogate human and perhaps divine authority. This book is an important addition to our understanding of the cultural work performed by Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre.