The Elizabethan time: refer to the period in English history from 1485 to 1625. This \English Renaissance and saw the flowering of poetry, music and literature. The era is most famous for theatre, as William Shakespeare and many others composed plays that broke free of England's past style of theatre. It was an age of exploration and expansion abroad, while back at home, the Protestant Reformation became more acceptable to the people, most certainly after the Spanish Armada was repulsed. It was also the end of the period when England was a separate realm before its royal union with Scotland.
Renaissance(文艺复兴): The Renaissance Movement is a great revolution carried out in the fourteenth to the mid-seventeenth century Europe. It marks the transition from the medieval to the modern world in Western Europe. It first started in Italy in the 14th century and gradually spread all over Europe. The word “Renaissance” means rebirth or revival. In essence, it is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe and introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to lift the restriction in all areas placed by the Roman Catholic Church authorities. Two features of renaissance: It is a thirsting curiosity for the classical literature. People learned to admire the Greek and Latin works as
models of literary form. It is the keen interest in the activities of humanity. Humanism is the key-note of the Renaissance.
Humanism: A philosophy that places faith in the dignity of humankind and rejects the medieval perception of the individual as a weak, fallen creature. \of human nature and view reason and education as the means to that end.