Although the fantastical metadrama of The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream displays some ambivalence over the extent to which authority is compromised by the use of informers, it still registers some of the typical pressures of dramatic production relating to unstable oversight, mistaking agents and confused audiences. Indeed the plays’ magical settings may serve to license a more revealing picture of authorities’ reliance on these figures than either Jonsonian realism or tragic form generally achieves.

In proposing that The Tempest ‘ challenges the boundaries between illusion and reality’, Vaughan and Vaughan's 2011 Arden introduction echoes much of the critical consideration of the metadramatic aspect of the play. In his edition of 1968 Stanley Wells argued that Shakespeare played with these boundaries ‘in the consciousness that reality must triumph in the end’; until Pericles (1608–9), he says, the distinction between ‘levels of reality’ had remained as clear as those between ‘the illusory world and real world, the actor and the ordinary man’. Wells's account relies on a narrower definition of metadrama than I use here. If we think for instance of the continually metadramatic nature of an earlier play like Hamlet, doubts concerning the division between the illusory world and the real world are certainly not limited to the clearly demarcated play within the play. Nevertheless, since both The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream displace the functionalities of authority into landscapes of magic, dream and fantasy, here a discourse of ‘illusion and reality’ must be considered. Although its socio-political roots may to some extent be obscured by these structures of ‘illusion’, their metadrama, and the imagery of informing which surrounds it, are no less politicised than that set in ‘real-world’ scenarios. In any case we need to be careful with word ‘illusion’ since it occurs only once in MND (3.2.98) and never in The Tempest. It may also be useful to remember that a sizeable proportion of people at this time took magic, evil spirits and the mischievous actions of fairies very seriously, as many contemporary accounts of witchcraft trials attest.