ABSTRACT

In the late Elizabethan and Jacobean history plays the public record of Privy Council, Parliament and courtroom is eclipsed by the private history of men and women who look inward to decode the record of conscience. This record reveals itself on every page of Actes and Monuments, supplanting Foxe's account of godly monarchs as the true combatants in the battle with Antichrist. Actes and Monuments and the Foxean history plays are united by assumptions about conscience that enhance its power and shape its representation. In Actes and Monuments the Continental and English Reformations represent only one historical moment in which the revelations of conscience made manifest the working of Providence in apocalyptic history. Like Foxe, the dramatists both celebrate conscience and struggle to contains its anarchical, individuating impulses that threaten a Protestant consensus. The Foxean playwrights recreate and in a sense continue to create the English Reformation by staging the past as an account of the acts of conscience.