Shakespeare’s career took place during the end of the Elizabethan Era, a name referencing the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The last decades of the 16th century were a peaceful golden age in England. Political turmoil was at a low point. Despite rising tensions between Catholics and Protestants, the country remained stable, as Elizabeth kept a tight leash on internal opponents and united the populace against external enemies such as Spain, whose Armada the English navy repelled in 1588. Internally, England would see peace until the Civil War that would grip it in the middle of the 17th century.

While Shakespeare was writing, between the 1580s and the 1610s, England was experiencing its version of the European Renaissance. Because of unprecedented access to education, as during the Tudor period increasing numbers of boys began attending grammar schools, audiences for the arts expanded, just as royal and noble patronage of art financed its production. Literary movements flourished: poetry introduced and popularized inventive new forms like the sonnet (Shakespeare’s particular favorite), the Spenserian stanza, and blank verse; prose narratives appeared, paving the way for what we know as the novel; and the era saw a tremendous growth of theater, with plays that spoke to contemporary concerns such as exploration, colonization, and empire, as well as age-old questions of birthright and political power.