The Elizabethan Era, the period associated with Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558–1603), is often considered to be the golden age in English history.

It is the height of the English Renaissance and sees the flowering of English poetry and literature.

This is also the time during which Elizabethan theater flourishes and William Shakespeare and many others, composed plays that broke free of England's past style of plays and theater.

It is an age of exploration and expansion abroad, while back at home, the Protestant Reformation becomes the national mindset of all the people.The Elizabethan Age is viewed so highly because of the contrasts with the periods before and after.

It is 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 are to engulf the seventeenth century.

The Protestant/Catholic divide is settled, for a time, by the Elizabethan Religious Settlement, and parliament is not yet strong enough to challenge royal absolutism.

England is 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 is embroiled in its own religious battles that are only settled in 1598 with the Edict of Nantes.

In part because of this, but also because the English have been expelled from their last outposts on the continent, the centuries-long conflict between France and England is largely suspended for most of Elizabeth's reign.England’s one great rival is Spain, with which England conflicts both in Europe and the Americas in skirmishes that explode into the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604.

An attempt by Philip II of Spain to invade England with the Spanish Armada in 1588 is famously defeated, but the tide of war turns against England with a disastrously unsuccessful attack upon Spain, the Drake-Norris Expedition of 1589.

Thereafter Spain provides some support for Irish Catholics in a draining guerilla war against England, and Spanish naval and land forces inflict a series of defeats upon English forces.

This badly damages both the English Exchequer and economy that had been so carefully restored under Elizabeth's prudent guidance.

English colonization and trade will be frustrated until the signing of the Treaty of London the year following Elizabeth's death.England during this period has a centralized, well-organized, and effective government, largely a result of the reforms of Henry VII and Henry VIII.

Economically, the country begins to benefit greatly from the new era of trans-Atlantic trade.