"Originally published in 2011 by Hutchinson, Great Britain."

Includes bibliographical references (pages 395-408) and index

The Early Reign. The difficulty ; The New World ; Ceremonial: twixt earnest and twixt game ; Men in power ; Which Church? ; The new learning ; A library at Mortlake ; The Northern Rebellion. -- 1570s. St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre ; Elizabethan women ; Histories ; Kenilworth ; Ireland ; Sir Francis Drake's circumnavigation ; A frog he would a-wooing go. -- 1580s. Religious dissent ; Sir Philip Sidney ; Hakluyt and empire ; The Scottish queen ; The Armada. ; London and theatre ; Marprelate and Hooker. -- The Close of the Reign. A hive for bees ; Sex and the city ; The occult philosophy ; My America ; Tyrone ; Essex and the end ; Hamlet: one through two

This account of the Elizabethan age evaluates the contributions of such figures as Francis Drake and William Shakespeare while exploring definitive events, from the declaration of religious liberty to the establishment of British imperialism. A time of exceptional creativity, wealth creation, and political expansion, the Elizabethan age was also more remarkable than any other for the Technicolor personalities of its leading participants. Apart from the complex character of the Virgin Queen herself, this work follows the stories of Francis Drake, a privateer who not only defeated the Spanish Armada but also circumnavigated the globe with a drunken, mutinous crew and without reliable navigational instruments; political intriguers like William Cecil and Francis Walsingham; and Renaissance literary geniuses from Sir Philip Sidney to Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare. Most crucially, this was the age when modern Britain was born and established independence from mainland Europe, both in its resistance to Spanish and French incursions and in its declaration of religious liberty from the Pope, and laid the foundations for the explosion of British imperial power and eventual American domination