The two Every Man plays, though separated in their writing and performance by only a short period of time, show a development within Jonson's work towards an increasingly critical depiction of the self-interested interpreter and the corrupting influence of the informer. This growing tendency will form a significant element in many of Jonson's later plays, especially where they deal with issues of social and cultural authority, and this is very often expressed through metadramatic forms.

Every Man In His Humour: ‘a stir of art and devices’

Every Man In His Humour, initially performed in 1598 and Jonson's first big theatrical success, is a play whose metadrama reproduces structures of surveillance and informing while also proposing an explicit ideal of interpretative practice. In its revision of 1616, the subject of this study, the play's relocation in London allows for a fuller sense of local identification with plot and character than the earlier Italianate version. Here the intermingling of informer, audience and authority, though troubled, ultimately produces an interpretative model that recognises the artistic authority of the author, and over-rides the play's tensions between legitimate and illegitimate authorities, creative, personal and civic.

The play describes how an intercepted letter enables the elder Knowell to follow his supposedly studious son, Edward, to London and there spy upon his life of debauchery with the gallants and poetasters of the time. Knowell's servant Brainworm acts as his informer upon Edward. But Jonson is equivocal about the nature of authority this implies. The deliberate breach of the privacy of the letter obviously entails a betrayal, but it is couched within a legitimising patriarchal oversight. The father's wish to curb the son's propensity for poetic licentiousness displays a general antitheatricality but even more so shares Jonson's specific distaste for poetasters. This social critique, which exposes the surveillance inherent in the system of patronage, is not without some equivocation about its devices and motives. The informing servant Brainworm, one of the many misusers of information, secretive note-takers and informers, which Hutson agrees ‘haunt Jonson's writing’, of course, turns out to be troublingly subversive.