ABSTRACT
Imitating the historiographic structure of Actes and Monuments, the Foxean dramatists reenact the complementary histories of the true Church and her Roman counterpart. All of these plays participate in Foxe's effort to rehabilitate English Reformation heroes and to defend their Puritan successors by discrediting a false history, which, Foxe believed, promoted Catholic ideology and aggrandized the power of Rome. Actes and Monuments repeatedly contests the veracity of historical representations of Protestant confessors authored by their opponents, accusing them of vilifying the true Church. Foxe's reclamation of Oldcastle is a seminal expression of his historiographic agenda. His effort to construct a history of English Protestantism as a genealogy of faithful martyrs persecuted for the sake of the gospel required that he dissociate religious dissent from sedition. The dramatists' vindication of Oldcastle introduces a new historiography that realigns the players made familiar in the chronicle plays of the 1590s.
