The "Elizabethan Era" refers to England under the reign of Elizabeth I, who ruled from 1558 to 1603. Literature first flowered in England under Elizabeth, and saw the rise of playwrights like Christopher Marlowe and Ben Johnson, poets like Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare, who wrote both plays and poems. John Milton, author of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, wrote during the period of the English Civil War and the Commonwealth, nearly a half decade after Elizabeth's death.