... the decades following 1563, to top 200,000 people for the first time, and a massive new middle class was influencing the economic, cultural, and literary development of the nation. The Renaissance Humanistic movement, spilling in from Europe, had ushered in a new era of interest in learning and the classics; and in the past half century, English writers and poets had, for ... the first time, begun to try to create literature in their native tongue that could stand up to the greatest works written in Latin, French, or Italian. And in 1599, a thirty-five-year-old playwright named William ...

• Word Count: 1477
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: High School