Why do we care about the past? How does caring about the past enable historicism? This project answers such questions by attending to the methodological innovations of Reformation historians as they were refined and literalized in the English Renaissance theater. We cannot understand the productive tensions among history, desire, and subjectivity that persist to this day without understanding the reciprocal developments in dramatic form and historiographic method that emerged from the crucible of the Reformation. Sixteenth-century Protestant historians such as John Foxe both recount and provoke a desire that produces history as a series of performances in which we are all simultaneously readers, writers, audiences, and actors. The productive tension between the objectivity that Foxe wants from history and his awareness of the inherent subjectivity of actually producing history is a discursive engine. Foxe uses the theater as the central metaphor for his historiography, and his reorientation of popular conceptions of the past was central to the rapid innovations in dramatic form in Renaissance England. The late-Elizabethan theater, unique in sixteenth-century Europe, sold plays both as performances and as printed texts. The need to appeal to both audiences and readers ensures that the question of why we should care about history is baked into the history play as a commercial genre. The remarkable metatheatricality of late-Elizabethan history plays literalize the methodological gestures of Reformation historiography. They consistently stage the histories of their own production and reception in ways that frame many of the cruxes that continue to occupy scholars today. Criticism is not distinct from the representational dynamics it studies. Rather, modern scholars participate in an ongoing performance of textual proliferation marked not by exhilaration or satisfaction, but by frustration, boredom, and paranoia. Far from blunting the appeal of history, our persistence in spite of the manifest impossibility of satisfaction attests to the continued power of historiographic desire to produce vertiginous sequences of imaginary performances and fictional texts.