Like the informer, any artist is essentially an interpreter, whether the interpretation is of a political reality, a nuance of culture, an emotion, or a handkerchief. That act of interpretation, which generates an origination or a reworking to produce a text, always places the artist in some alethic relation to the original. The dramatic author is perceived to be both storyteller and interpreter, an originator and an augmentative passer-on of stories. But in the English language a taleteller very closely resembles the more incontinent tell-tale (the earliest recorded usage of the term ‘tell-tale’, meaning one who ‘maliciously discloses private or secret matters’ is 1548). There is an example of this usage in Nashe's The vnfortunate traueller (1594) where one is ‘privily informed’ upon by ‘hungry tale-tellers’. In fact, though all tale-tellers may not be tell-tales, all tell-tales are tale-tellers. In contemporaneous terms, the concept of the auctor obviates this connection to some extent with its adherence to a recognised authoritystructure accepted as a guarantee of truthfulness. The breakdown or shift in this convention of authentication and authorisation, to a signifi cant extent caused by the upheavals of the Reformation and the development of print culture, is in part the source of the tension within which at least Jonson's relationship with the reception of his plays is to be understood. Jonson deals with this shift often in directly didactic and structurally metadramatic terms, asserting himself as author in the transactions of authority and the authentic. Shakespeare, however, appears to lack Jonson's agitation about the perception of his authenticity, or possibly the same very public kinds of ambition, so where he deals with this it tends to be at a distance from his authorial self, his metadrama most often being manifested in the generative narrative interplay of his characters.

For both Shakespeare and Jonson, the self-referential nature of the metadrama we have looked at so far reveals a field of interconnections relating to issues of authority, authorship, interpretation and informing, and it is evident that in each case an identifiable dramatic figure emerges from them. This figure, usually male, is a combination of character types, and he crosses or transgresses various typical boundaries.