In Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1589–90), Thomas Middleton/Cyril Tourner's The Revenger's Tragedy (c.1602) and John Marston's The Malcontent (1605), as in many other plays of the period, intelligencer characters perform as exemplary dysfunctionals. They are not only the inheritors of the function of the Vice and demonic provocateurs of the medieval dramas, but now their meaning includes an implicit satirical social critique as they operate as metaphors for perceived inconsistencies in the authority structures of their societies. More so, as scapegoats, they offer the dramatist both an easy target and a deniability which allows for a broad critique of the dysfunction of authority while avoiding the accusation of attaching that to persons of social power. Who, after all, would like to associate themselves with the ‘hellish detested Judas name of an Intelligencer’ by assuming that such a figure represented them on the early modern stage?

In the early morality plays of the medieval church, the attributes of the Christian Devil are often personified as individual vices, but around the middle of the sixteenth century, this mutated into a ‘single representative figure of evil’, or the Vice, as Antony Hammond notes, whose method is always ‘deceit and guile’. This often metadramatic figure attracts the audience's sympathy both by ‘embodying its own destructive and anti-authoritarian impulses, and by engaging the audience in a conspiratorial relationship’. These functions can be made to serve highly metadramatic purposes, while also being apt for the depiction of underhand characters. As plays evolved a progressively secular character, the collusive aspects of this relationship became increasingly empathetic and resulted in the kinds of villain figures that carry the characteristics of the informer and intelligencer It is arguable that the popular awareness of Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince (1514) not only developed alongside the evolution of this Vice figure, but inflected its development in the English theatre. In The Prince, pragmatism rather than morality is the primary virtue and this view suggests a situation in which a ruler might feel justified in discarding their moral principles in defence of their supremacy. The moral compromise associated with dealing with informers then would be a non-issue, and the sense of moral outrage felt in a society subject to their corrupted ministries would be of little concern.