The metadrama which proliferates around Hal and the substantial figure of Falstaff offers a significant contrast with the dramatic austerity associated with the eponymous agonist of Coriolanus. This chapter explores how metadrama, haunted by the insidious figure of the informer, can reveal disjunctions between an ideal of authentic authority and what is termed ‘policy’. The contemporary meaning of the word ‘policy’ involves the aggressive Machiavellian social roleplay and self-counterfeiting often associated at the time with political parasites and informers, but in these plays it also takes in the performative aspect of authority, reaching right to the very top of the social hierarchy.

In its staging of its austere protagonist, Coriolanus gives Shakespeare an opportunity to deal with these issues surrounding authority and authenticity through a character who is hostile to the theatre of political power. The excessively self-dramatising Falstaff, on the other hand, provides an affectionate parody of authority which is aided by his perceived nature as Shakespeare's homo repudiandus, the representation of all that is to be rejected. It is a testament to the continued currency of his dramatic character that Falstaff has become one of Shakespeare's most enduring dramatic creations: as David Scott Kastan points out, there are ‘more references to the fat knight up until the end of the eighteenth century than to any other literary character’. Nicholas Rowe's Life of Shakespeare (1709) declares that ‘Falstaff is allow'd by every body to be a Master-piece’ and claims that the Queen herself asked Shakespeare write a play of Falstaff in love. Coriolanus, however, was more or less forgotten until Nahum Tate's revival of the play in 1681, and played only sporadically thereafter.

The relationship of these perceptions of authority and policy to dramatic authorship and its interpretation may be seen in Chapman's letter of c.1608, which is contemporary with Coriolanus and addressed most probably to the Master of the Revels, protesting the censorship of his own Byron plays. Chapman had of course been in serious trouble, along with Jonson, for Eastward Ho! just three years previously, imprisoned and threatened with what Dutton calls ‘judicial mutilation’.