At the time he was writing, Elizabeth I had been queen for more than thirty years. Though she could on occasion be prickly, difficult, and imperious, her fundamental respect for the sanctity of the realm’s political institutions was not generally in doubt. Even those who advocated a more aggressive foreign policy or clamored for a harsher crackdown on domestic subversion than she was willing to authorize ordinarily acknowledged her prudent sense of the limits to her power. Shakespeare is very unlikely to have regarded her, even in his most private thoughts, as a tyrant.
