Short answers, pulled from the story.
Elizabethan literature refers to works produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I from 1558 to 1603. It encompasses drama, poetry, and prose, including new forms such as the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza, and dramatic blank verse, as well as historical chronicles, pamphlets, and the first English novels.
The central figures of the Elizabethan canon are Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson. Other major writers include John Lyly, Thomas Nashe, Thomas Kyd, Walter Raleigh, John Donne, and Richard Hooker.
Thomas Wyatt, born in 1503, introduced the sonnet from Italy into England alongside Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Wyatt adapted the Petrarchan model by adding a closing rhyming couplet after the sestet, with a common sestet scheme of CDDC EE, which marked the beginning of the English sonnet structure of three quatrains and a closing couplet.
The Spanish Tragedy, written by Thomas Kyd and performed in 1592, established the revenge tragedy as a genre in English theatre. It was widely referenced and parodied by other playwrights including Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe, and several of its elements, including the play-within-a-play and the vengeful ghost, appear in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, written around 1592, drew on German folklore to tell the story of a scientist and magician who sells his soul to the Devil in pursuit of unlimited knowledge and power. The play used the structure of medieval morality plays, featuring figures like the good angel, the bad angel, the seven deadly sins, and the devils Lucifer and Mephistopheles.
Jane Lumley, born in 1537 and dead in 1578, is credited with the first known dramatic work in English by a woman. Her translation of Euripides's Iphigeneia at Aulis is also the first translation of Euripides into English.