In Francis Beaumont's The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), the metadramatic field of representative play and social commentary includes a very obvious example of an onstage audience, comprising a Citizen and his wife Nell, who emerge from offstage to interfere with the performance. These metadramatis personae are clearly meant to offer an ironic and entertainingly chaotic element, but their constant interferingly critical observation of each passing scene suggests something more serious may be going on. Their intrusive presence in this play seems a very apt mirror for the widely felt sense of continuous scrutiny by potential intelligencers in early modern society and, more particularly, in relation to a significant anxiety over the interpretation of the fictional worlds of the theatre.

When this hyper-vigilant onstage Citizen judges that there is ‘abomination knavery in this play’ (1.61), to which he is a very visible audience, his response is to utter darkly suggestive threats about what he might do with such information. These murmurings appear to cow the actors in the midst of their performance and place informing at the metadramatic centre of the offstage audience's experience of the play. In Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614), other unsafe or threatening onstage audiences appear, as may be exemplified by the self-informing overseer Justice Overdo or the hypocritically moralistic puritan Zeal-of-the-land Busy. Their metadramatic interactions also suggest a concern with a general malaise affecting interpretation and authority, one which is somehow putting the seemingly natural connection between the legitimacy of each out of joint. Jonson's onstage watchers seem very much cast in the mould of the interrupting citizens of this, his Mermaid Tavern companion's earlier metadramatic play, except for the fact that Jonson's onstage audiences are often allowed only ridiculous or overblown reactions, a kind of didactic dysfunction, while remaining entirely under the control of the author. Although The Knight of the Burning Pestle stages a similar disjunction, Beaumont's onstage audience are allowed a much more actively intrusive role, as they attempt to control both the writing and the production of the play they inhabit. Unlike in many other metadramatic interactions, in this case the players are forced to react to these unruly disruptions and alter the play as they go along, extemporising in response to the ugly incursions they encounter.