In Poetaster (1601) and Sejanus (1603), Ben Jonson's metadramatic technique addresses the legitimacy of both poetic and political authority in relation to types of self-performance. Jonson's explicit concern in Poetaster is the position of poetry in a healthy society; for him this entails self-promotion, with the added imperative of specifically lampooning the failings of rivals. Sejanus meanwhile offers a critique of corrupt ambition. But at the edges of these fields of poetic apology and social invective the metadrama shades into another, more disturbing narrative. Here again the despised figure of the informer lurks, as a significant element in both Sejanus's satire of vicious authority and Poetaster's deprecation of artistic adversaries. In each case, a particular kind of authority is tainted by the connection. In ‘An Epistle to a Friend’, Jonson expresses his concern over the fact that ‘flatterers, spies, / Informers, masters both of arts and lies, / [are] […] easier far to find / Than once to number.’ This perception is borne out in wider society, as we have seen, and Jonson's defensive concern to establish the role of the poetic satirist as a Horatian ideal may in part result from his dealings with authorities contaminated by this association.

Critics have noted the echoes of these issues. Speaking generally, Kaplan notes that Jonson always reserves the poet's right ‘to identify and condemn official corruption’. More specifically, Donaldson relates the informing in Sejanus to the intimidation of contemporary London Catholic communities, which were under what he describes as the ‘constant threat of surveillance’. Kay's biography also notes Jonson's indignation at this ‘prevailing atmosphere of intrigue and fear’ and relates this to Sejanus's nightmare vision, where, as he says, all live ‘in terror of informers, arbitrary justice and the executioner’. Though Meskill's reading of Jonson tends to suggest that poetic reputation was chiefly what was at stake, she also concedes the ‘frightening power of [the spectator] to affect the poet's earthly fate’.