Elizabethan literature

Elizabethan literature refers to bodies of work produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and is one of the most splendid ages of English literature. In addition to drama and the theatre, it saw a flowering of poetry, with new forms like the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as prose, including historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels. Major writers include William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, John Lyly, John Donne, Walter Raleigh, Richard Hooker, Ben Jonson, Philip Sidney,^[2] Thomas Kyd, and Richard Barnfield.