The Elizabethan period has often been represented as a 'Golden Age' featuring domestic peace and the flowering of cultural production, especially drama. Using neglected documentary evidence, Curtis C. Breight presents an opposite view, arguing that the Elizabethan state was in fact controlled by a Machiavellian faction founded by Sir William Cecil, whose power lay in focusing English energies in global conflict between Protestant England and international Catholicism.

He reveals how knowledge gained through surveillance facilitated massive military and maritime operations in which many lives were lost, fuelling popular resistance to domestic and foreign policies.

This national and international conflict energised the drama of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, both of whom scrutinised the Cecilian policies in their plays. Drawing on archival sources, pamphlets, state and critical theory together with historiography, this groundbreaking study interprets their drama from a postdisciplinary perspective and shows it to be closely bound with the realpolitik of its time.