Traditionally, the plays of William Shakespeare have been grouped into three categories: tragedies, comedies, and histories. Some critics have argued for a fourth category, the romance. Like most Western tragedies, a Shakespearean tragedy usually depicts a protagonist who falls from grace and dies, along with a fair proportion of the rest of the cast. It has been suggested that Shakespearean tragedy is the polar opposite of a comedy: it exemplifies the sense that human beings are inevitably doomed through their own failures or errors, or even the ironic action of their virtues, or through the nature of fate, destiny, or the human condition to suffer, fail, and die…. In other words, it is a drama with a necessarily unhappy ending.

      Shakespeare wrote tragedies from the beginning of his career: one of his earliest plays was the Roman tragedy Titus Andronicus, and he followed it a few years later with Romeo and Juliet. [However, his most admired tragedies were written in a seven-year period between 1601 and 1608:] [Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth] (his four major tragedies) and Antony & Cleopatra, along with the lesser-known Timon if Athens and Troilus and Cressida.

      [ Many have linked these plays to Aristotle’s precept about tragedy: that the protagonist must be an admirable but flawed character, with the audience able to understand and sympathize with the character. Certainly, each of Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists is capable of both good and evil.] The playwright insists always on the operation of the doctrine of free will: always the ( anti ) hero is able to back out, to redeem himself. But, the author dictates, they must move unheedingly to their doom.

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Elizabeth’s reign is referred to as the Elizabethan era or the Golden Age of Elizabeth. Playwrights William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlow, and Ben Jonson all flourished during this era: Francis Drake became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe: Francis Bacon laid out his philosophical and political views: and English colonisation of North America took place under Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Humphrey Gilbert. A favourite motto for her was video et taceo (I see and keep silent ) . This last quality, viewed with impatience by her counsellors, often Henry VIII, she was writer and poet. She granted Royal Charters to several famous organisations, including Trinity College, Dublin ( its official name is the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Elizabeth near Dublin ) in 1592 and the British East India Company ( 1600 ).                                                                                     

In nearly forty-five years, only nine peerage dignities, one earldom and seven baronies in the peerage of England, and one barony in the peerage of Ireland, were created. She also reduced the number of Privy Counsellors from thirty-nine to nineteen, and later to fourteen.                                                                

The Commonwealth of Virginia, a former English colony in North America and one of the United States of Americas original 13 states, was named after Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen"

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The Elizabethan Era is the period associated with the reign of Queen Elizabeth I ( 1558 – 1603 ) and is often considered to be a golden age in English history. It was the height of the English Renaissance, and saw the flowering of English literature and poetry This was also the time during which Elizabethan theatre flourished and William Shakespeare, among others composed plays that broke away from England’s past style of plays. It was an age of expansion and exploration abroad, while at home the protestant Reformation became entrenched in the national mindset.                              

The Elizabethan Age is viewed so highly because of the contrast with the periods before and after. It was a brief period of largely internal peace between the English Reformation and the battles between protestants and Catholics and the battles between parliament and the monarchy that would engulf the seventeenth century. The Protestant/ Catholic divide was settled, for a time, by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement and parliament was still not strong enough to challenge royal absolutism.

                                

England was also well-off compared to the other nations of Europe. The Italian Renaissance had come to an end under the weight of foreign domination of the peninsula. France was embroiled in its own religious battles that would only be settled in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes. In part because of this, but also because the English had been expelled from their last outposts on the continent, the centuries long conflict between France and England was largely suspended for most of Elizabeth’s reign.

The one great rival was Spain, with which England conflicted both in Europe and the Americas in skirmishes that exploded into the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585 – 1604. An attempt by Philip II of Spain to invade England with the Spanish Armada in 1588 was famously defeated, but the tide of war turned against England

with a disastrously unsuccessful attack upon Spain, the Drake– Norris Expedition of 1589. Thereafter Spain provided some support for Irish Catholics in a draining guerrilla war against England and Spanish naval and land forces inflicted a series of defeats upon English forces. This badly damaged both the English Exchequer and economy that had been so carefully restored under Elizabeth’s prudent guidance. English colonization and trade would be frustrated until the singing of the Treaty of London the year following Elizabeth's death.

England during this period had a centralized, well-organized, and effective government, largely a result of the reforms of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Economically,the country began to benefit greatly from the new era of trans-Atlantic trade.                                                        

Elizabeth I ( 7 September 1533 – 24 march 1603 ) was Queen of England, Queen of France ( in name only ), and Queen of Ireland from 17 November 1558 until her death. She is sometimes referred to as The Virgin Queen ( as she never married ), Gloriana, or Good Queen Bess, and was immortalized by Edmund Spenser as the Faerie Queen Elizabeth I was the sixth and final monarch of the Tudor dynasty ( along with Henry VII, Henry VIII, her half-brother Edward VI, her cousin Jane, and her half-sister Mary I).[She reigned for 44 years, during a period marked by increases in English power and influence worldwide, as well as great religious turmoil within England

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The Renaissance Age in Literature and History

The word Renaissance ( French for  'rebirth', or Rinascimento in Italian) was first used to define the historical sge in Italy – and in Europe in general- thst followed rge Middle Ages and preceded the Reformation, spanning roughly the 14^th through the 16^th century. The principal features were the revival of learning based on classical sources, the rise of courtly and papal patronage, the development of perspective, and the advancements of science. The word Renaissance is now often used to describe other historical and cultural moments ( e.g the Carolingian Renaissance, the Byzantine Renaissances).

Renaissance Self-awareness

By the fifteenth century, writers, artists, and architects in Italy were well aware of the transformations that were taking place and were using phrases like modi antichi (in the antique manner) or alle romana et alla antica (in manner of the Romans and the ancients) to describe their work. As to the term "rebirth", it seems that Albrecht Durer in 1523 was the first to use such a term when he uses Widererwachsung ( German: rebirth ) to describe Italian art. The term "la rinascita" first appeared, however, in its broad sense in Giorgio Vasari's Vite de' piu eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori Italian ( The Lives of the Artists, 1550-68). Vasari divides the age into phases: the first phase contains Cimabue, Giotto and Arnolof di Cambio; the second phase contains Masaccio, Brunelleschi and Donatello; the third centers on Leonardo da Vinci, culminating with Michelangelo. It was not just the growing awareness of classical antiquity that drove this development, according to Vasari, but also the growing desire to study and imitate nature.

The Renaissance as a Historical Age.

The period did not become recognized as a historical age, however, until the early 19^th century during which time the word renaissance In French came to be used to describe it. The Renaissance was first defined by French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), in his Histoire de France (History of France, 1885). For Michelet, the Renaissance was less a development in art and culture as in science. For him, it spanned the period from Columbus to Copernicus to Galileo, in other words from the end of the 15^th century to the middle of the 17^th century. The Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) in his Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italian ( The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1860) ( English translation, by SGC Middlemore, in 2 vols., London, 1878), by contrast, followed Vasari, defining the Renaissance as the period between the Italian painters Giotto and Michelangelo. His book was widely read and influential in the development of the modern interpretation of the Italian Renaissance. In architecture, the folio of measured drawings Edifices de Rome moderne; ou, Recueil des palais, maisons, eglises, couvents et autres monuments, ( The Buildings of Modern Rome) first published in 1840, by Paul Letarouilly (1795-1855) also played an important part in the revival odf interest in this period.

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Anglo-Saxon literature (or Old English literature) encompasses literature written in Anglo-Saxon period of Britain, from the mid-5^th century to the Norman Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and other literary works. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, a significant corpus of both popular interest and specialist research.

Some of the most important works from this period include the poem of Beowulf, which has achieved national epic status in Britain, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of early English history, and the poem of Caedmon's Hymn from the 7^th century, one of the oldest surviving written texts in English.

Old English literature, though more abundant than literature of the continent before 1000 A.D, is, nonetheless, scanty. In his supplementary article to 1935 posthumous edition of Bright's Anglo-Saxon Reader, Dr. James Hulbert Writes:

In such historical conditions, an incalculable amount of the writings of the Anglo-Saxon period perished. What they contained, how important they were for an understanding of literature before the conquest, we have no means of knowing: the scant catalogs of monastic libraries do not help us, and there are no references in extant works to other compositions … How incomplete our materials are can be illustrated by the well-known fact that, with few and relatively unimportant exceptions, all extant Anglo-Saxon poetry is preserved in four manuscripts.

Old English was one of the first vernacular languages to be written down. As mentioned earlier, some of the most important surviving works of Old English literature are Beowulf, an epic poem, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a record of early English history, and Caedmon's Hymn, a Christian religious poem. There are also a number of extant prose works, such as sermons and saints' lives, biblical translations, and translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers, legal documents, such as laws and wills, and practical works on grammar, medicine, and geography. Still, poetry is considered to be the heart of Old English literature. Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous, with a few exceptions, such as Bede and Caedmon.

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In historiography, the term Dark Ages or Dark Age most commonly refers to the European Early Middle Ages, the period encompassing (roughly) 476 to 1000. This concept of " Dark Age " was created by the Italian scholar Francesco Petrarch and Was originally intended as sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin Literature. Later historians expanded the term to include not only the lack of Latin literature, but a lack of  contemporary written history and material cultural achievements in general. Popular culture has further expanded on the term as a vehicle to depict the middle ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope. The rise of archaeology and other specialties in the 20^th century has shed much light on the period and offered a more nuanced understanding of its positive developments. Other terms of periodization have come to the fore: Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages and the Great Migrations, depending on which aspects of culture are being emphasized.

Most modern historians dismiss the notion that the era was a "Dark Age" by pointing out that this idea was based on ignorance of the period combined with popular stereotypes, many previous authors would simply assume that the era was a dismal time of violence and stagnation and use this assumption to prove itself. The term is now widely considered to be pejorative.

In Britain and the United States, the phrase "Dark Ages" has occasionally been used by professionals, with severe qualifications, as a term of periodization. This usage is intended as non-judgmental and simply means the relative lack of written record, " silent " as much as " Dark "

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