In early modern society, the figure of the intelligencer is perceived to be everywhere and yet felt to be appearing nowhere. This often demonic figure may be said to express a culturally significant pathology that is also simultaneously universal and indeterminate and which affects the concept of authority at its deepest level. In daily life, the actual intelligencer would most often by necessity be anonymous, except to the authorities to which they fed their information and in the case that they were required to appear in court to support their assertions. Their nature, within the contested space of early modern authority, is to be occulted via a social mode that allows for this anonymity and invisibility. Their widely supposed ubiquity, however, was a necessary and facilitating function of their role as pervasive projections of the influence of the powerful over the communities they wished to supervise. Although resistant to clear definition, the intelligencer/informer nevertheless finds its place on the early modern stage and, as should be plain by now, the metadrama of early modern theatre was the cultural form most appropriate to the embodiment of this social phenomenon. There are various reasons why this is the case, and the nature of how this dramatic mode accords with the figure of the intelligencer has been the subject of this book, which maps the common practices, forms and structures of each onto the other and posits explanations for why this symmetry might exist.

There is a further possible connection, however, and this is related to metadrama's structural concern with conventions of both absence and presence in the workings of its self-reference and especially in its depiction of audiences. In the many modes of metadrama, offstage audiences are imagined within the structures of inner plays, posited as characters in the drama, referred to in their extra-dramatic actuality, mirrored, parodied, marginalised, recast as other bodies, defined onstage or simply ignored in favour of another imagined audience. In these various ways, the audiences of early modern drama should be very well used to the regular alternation of being perceived as absent or present at any given time.