Editing Elizabethan era (section)

==Romance and reality==
[[File:Elizabeth succession allegory.jpg|left|thumb|"Elizabeth ushers in Peace and Plenty." Detail from ''The Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory of the Tudor Succession'', {{Circa|1572}}, attributed to [[Lucas de Heere]].]]
The [[Victorian era]] and the early 20th century idealised the Elizabethan era. The ''[[Encyclopædia Britannica]]'' maintains that "[T]he long reign of Elizabeth I, 1558–1603, was England's Golden Age... '[[Merry England]]', in love with life, expressed itself in music and literature, in architecture and adventurous seafaring".<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20061112031836/https://www.britannica.com/ebi/article-200261 Elizabeth I and England's Golden Age]. Britannica Student Encyclopedia</ref> This idealising tendency was shared by Britain and Anglophilic America. In popular culture, the image of those adventurous Elizabethan seafarers was embodied in the films of [[Errol Flynn]].<ref>See ''[[The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex]]'' (1939) and ''[[The Sea Hawk (1940 film)|The Sea Hawk]]'' (1940).</ref>

In response and reaction to this hyperbole, modern historians and biographers have tended to take a more dispassionate view of the Tudor period.<ref>{{cite journal|author=Patrick Collinson|title=Elizabeth I and the verdicts of history|journal=Historical Research|year=2003|volume=76 |issue =194|pages=469–91|doi=10.1111/1468-2281.00186}}</ref>