ABSTRACT
An early modern theatergoer buying a ticket for a play based on John Foxe's Actes and Monuments would have expected to see onstage pious Protestant martyrs, bad Catholics, and the triumphant onward march of providential English history. But the 'Protestant martyr plays', as Michael O'Connell terms them. This chapter argues elsewhere, Sir Thomas More, although it dramatizes the life of a Catholic saint, functions as a model for later Protestant martyr plays. It excludes The Virgin Martyr on the grounds that it treats early Christian rather than English history, and The Whore of Babylon because, as staged allegory, it operates in a different theatrical mode than the plays it consider here. No wonder then if, even here, in a genre of plays about Protestant martyrs, where people most expect to find clear religious politics and when they hear the voices of Foxe's martyrs, the conditions of theatrical production open up space for the voices of a mixed religious culture.
