ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts of key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. The book focuses on Elizabeth's political words and actions. It is not a portrait of a great Elizabethan age, if indeed there was one. After all, some of Elizabeth's fame results simply from the coincidence of when she happened to live. Great explorers, builders, dramatists, poets, and musicians there were, but they owed little or nothing to her. She was not unlike Leicester and Essex, a major patron of the arts. Philip Sidney was a critic of her political and military restraint, and Edmund Spenser constructed models of what she ought to be: they wrote because of what Elizabeth wasn't, not out of admiration for what she was. Elizabeth did not foster a cultural renaissance or fund an imperial expansion. Her achievement, her great achievement perhaps was to play a difficult political hand with patience and skill.
