‘Subtle sleights’: Amity and the Informer in Damon and Pithias

The informer-figure permeates the conditions of early modern dramatic production and haunts the vagaries of reception towards which such ventures must look. Richard Edwards’s Damon and Pythias registers this awareness in its own metadrama, along with a basic typology of the kinds of illegitimate oversight associated with informers. A central issue here is the contested status of authority as a whole in a system reliant upon the devices and untrustworthy interpretations that come to be located in a wholly reviled class. It may not be entirely coincidental that 1564 also saw the expansion of the Privy Council’s policy of arresting and imprisoning people for recusancy and was thus a significant year in terms of the work of informers. Edwards’s drama offers its own solution to this perceived abuse of authority and social trust in the form of the classical amity of its eponymous friends.