If Suleyamn the Magnificent had a peer among the rulers of Europe during the Renaissance, an exemplar all the virtues that Castiglione's The Courtier and Machiavelli's The Prince said a sovereign should have, it was not a Renaissance man, but a Renaissance Woman, the most successful ruler Western Europe had seen since Charlemagne, Elizabeth the first, Queen of England. It was during her reign and with her patronage, that British drama flowered, rooted in a tradition of lyric and epic poetry and humanistic scholarship dating back to the the bards who preserved the tales of Beowulf and Arthur and the monks that saved the remnants of classical culture in their monasteries. Her support of drama produced the climate where Kidd, Marlowe, Webster and Shakespeare brought drama back to life as a major literary form, as surely as the Medicis created the the milieu that produced Florentine architecture, sculpture, and painting. Elizabeth was a product of renaissance education, a master of languages, a musician, a poet, a skilled politician and a woman who believed that ruling and ruling well was more important than breeding a descendant to inherit the English Crown. She understood virtu and when fortuna gave her the opportunity, seized it to teach Machiavelli that one might rule in such a way as to be loved rather than feared.