This project crosses two related boundaries in the history of theater: the one between classical and Christian culture, the other between late medieval and Renaissance drama. I want to ease both divisions by stressing the common ground between Christianity and Seneca. When Renaissance dramatists claimed to revive antiquity by way of his drama, they did not return to that drama as something opposed or alterior to Christian revelation. The gospels, the liturgy, and the acts of the martyrs (as the project’s first half will show) had been as much a product of, and meditation on, pagan violence as was his drama. Seneca thus served (as the second half will argue) as an ironic preservative of drama’s medieval heritage at a moment in England when Protestant forces worked hard to extirpate Catholic “paganism“ by suppressing the Latin liturgy and the vernacular plays that took the gospels and saints lives as their chief models.