This chapter discusses the collaboratively written First Part of Sir John Oldcastle (1599) as a response to Shakespeare’s irreverent transformation of the eponymous Lollard martyr into Falstaff. Oldcastle restores the Lollard martyr to his heroic stature and is therefore often read in terms of a moderate, that is, politically loyal and conformist form of Puritanism. However, the play arguably, in its representation of nonconformity and a conditional form of political obedience, is more radical than is usually assumed and voices a nuanced challenge to royal supremacy over the Church of England. As this chapter further suggests, the play’s nonconformist ethos therefore also contributes to a more ambivalent conception of theatricality than the one embodied by Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a conception of theatricality that is defined by a self-reflexive distrust in the space between seeming and being.

A cornerstone text of England’s Reformation, John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments is deeply concerned with constructs of cultural memory and the use of that memory to steel the resolve of English Protestants to continue the hard work of reforming the church. First published in 1563 and borrowing from hagiographical traditions, Acts and Monuments attempts to legitimize the English Reformation by placing it in the continuum of early Christian persecutions and martyrdoms, and by further vilifying Catholics at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign following the Marian counter-Reformation. This chapter situates Foxe’s work in the context of cultural memorialization and traumatic historiography – that is, the construction and reiteration of cultural trauma through historic documentation/commemoration.

This chapter examines the figure of Henry V in Reformation-era histories from William Tyndale to William Shakespeare. It charts the efforts of first- and second-generation Protestants like William Tyndale, John Bale, John Foxe and others to overturn admiring impressions left by contemporary writers including Thomas Walsingham and Thomas Hoccleve, and picked up by later chroniclers such as Robert Fabyan, Polydore Vergil, Edward Hall and the Holinshed collaborators. What emerges is no single ‘Protestant’ interpretation of Henry as king, which reflects the challenges evangelicals encountered in this historical revisionism. Unlike Henry II and King John, whose battles with the Roman church provided ample fodder for reformers, Henry V’s narrative of domestic prosperity and military success, all while ostentatiously promoting religious orthodoxy, proved indelible. This chapter, then, will show that Henry was perceived ambivalently by many sixteenth-century historians, largely due to his persecution of religious dissenters. The only significant exception was Foxe the martyrologist, who took a strikingly independent line. Nevertheless, this chapter will show that the memory of Henry ultimately loomed too large for evangelical historians, proving that the remembered success of Henry’s reign outlasted critique even in England’s most influential history book, Foxe’s Acts and monuments.

The English Protestant martyrs’ letters, collected and memorialised in Foxe’s Acts and monuments (1563, with more letters added to each subsequent edition in 1570, 1576 and 1583) and in Coverdale and Bull’s Certain most godly, fruitful, and comfortable letters of such true saintes and holy martyrs of God (1564) were a crucial means by which the Tudor Reformation came to be remembered. This chapter argues that these monuments celebrated Protestant apostolic epistolary style in response to the Marian bishop John Christopherson’s direct attack on the presumptuous deployment of the form by the martyr letter writers, helping to shape a polemical context of epistolary memorialisation.This chapter uses the letters of Bishop John Hooper and Lawrence Saunders to examine the role of the literary biblical form of the apostolic letter (letters modelled in the New Testament by the apostles) in memorialising the Protestant Reformation in England and propagating its legacy. It also aims to demonstrate how the deployment of the apostolic model resisted the idea that the martyrology was simply historical commemoration. Radical and nonconformist Protestants across the seventeenth century continually appropriated these apostolic letters, asserting a distinctly Reformed epistolary tradition and inheritance and a distinctly Reformed interpretation of ongoing apostolic succession.