In many ways the subject of this book is the nature of authority. Having slipped the grip of the Catholic Church through Elizabeth's excommunication by papal bull in 1570 as ‘the pretended Queen of England and the servant of crime’, and with her ‘middle way’ having morphed into a Church of England in the process of establishing itself, authority itself is in question. This matter is not at all settled throughout the reigns of James and Charles Stuart, whose own personal connections with the threatening foreign power of the papacy, in combination with their own megalomaniacal insistence on the divine right, will eventually lead the country to discontent over the brink of civil war. Early modern debate around the legitimacy of theatre often concerned the question of the author's authority in relation to those of the licensing authorities and the religious factions which aimed to influence them. As we have seen, however, of greater concern to authors are the wildcard informers in the pay of these and the wider authorities, and especially those whose augmentative testimonies might land one in Newgate, Ludgate or the Clink. The fear of misinterpretation by intelligencers who are perceived to be dishonest by their very nature thus expresses the ambiguity of authority in the dramatic structures of early modern theatre. It helps to generate a self-conscious metadrama which often aims to manipulate audiences’ responses in a way most favourable to the author, for obvious defensive reasons. But since this metadrama is regularly concerned with the interchangeability of authority figures, informers and author-actors it also acknowledges the theatre's own potential for complicity in social control. In Philip Massinger's The Roman Actor (1626) these tensions and interconnections are embodied in the metadramatic representations of the dramatic productions in the tyrannous court of Domitian Caesar, which conflate the act of acting with the murderous nature of authority and its intelligencers, and finally reflect upon the nascent and highly theatrical court of Charles I itself.

Critical readings of this play have typically focused on the issue of theatrical constraints and artistic autonomy, and in this vein David A. Reinheimer cogently identifies here ‘a condemnation of the practice and the politics of censorship from the practical concerns of the performer’.