In Henry Chettle's only extant solo-authored play, The Tragedy of Hoffman (c.1602, pub. 1631), the metonymic device of the burning crown, used to execute usurpers, suggests an authority uneasy with its constituent elements. The play posits an authority, like many others depicted in the early modern theatre, whose very apparatus of power puts its own legitimacy in question. In Hoffman's contemplation of authority, however, metadramatic devices, though clearly linked to the exercise of advantageous oversight, have alternately destabilising and restorative functions. This may provide a useful comparative, but it also simply testifies to the flexibility of the form in representing various degrees and types of menacing oversight. In the context of a country seemingly awash with recreational intelligencers, revealing these can only be subversive to the mechanisms of control.

Throughout the narrative, whether they are pretenders dealing with the problematic anomaly of misused authority or established and dealing with misappropriated authority, the play's usurping and informing metadramatic actors seem to be punished in one way or another by hidden audiences. The limited nature of Chettle's success as a writer may have inflected his attitude to authority and the arbiters of power, and, as John Jowett argues, may have fashioned in Chettle a voice which is ‘contingent on circumstance, and mediated through personae’, so much so that ‘his authority to speak is compromised’. It is compelling to read Hoffman in this respect as something of an exploration of frustrated authority and this chapter will argue that Chettle's vision of the nature of authority here is as a performative construct that is deeply troubled by its own contingent control mechanisms.

The play has a very direct opening, as the eponymous protagonist is discovered in a coastal cave accompanied by the remains of his revered father, whose body appears to be displayed somehow. We discover that one Duke of Luningberg has put the father to death for piracy by crowning him with a red-hot iron crown. Somewhat conveniently for the narrative, Hoffman finds Luningberg's son, Otho, shipwrecked nearby and kills him in the same blistering way. He then goes on to steal Otho's identity to aid his project of revenge on the rest of the family. This seems to be working out until he shows the weakness of falling for Otho's mother, and he is thereby himself ensnared through metadramatic means.