This dissertation examines the fraught relationship between depictions and descriptions of time in Shakespeare's drama and the final years of Queen Elizabeth I's reign. This reading of Shakespeare's drama emerges from an understanding of early modern England's attempts to make sense of and to mark time in a specific historical moment that was fascinated with looking both to its own past and toward its uncertain future. As the last of the Tudor monarchs, Queen Elizabeth represented at once a seamless continuation of the past and a critical break from the future. This dissertation considers how Shakespeare's drama engages with England's anxiety concerning how the nation would conceive of both its history following the death of the childless Queen and its unknown future in a rapidly changing religious, political, and economic world. I argue that Shakespeare's drama articulates the anxiety concerning Queen Elizabeth I's aging body and her lack of a biological heir, an anxiety that manifests itself in a cultural obsession with marking and measuring time through objects, texts, bodies, and the environment. Even upon the death of the Queen and the accession of James I, an obsession with time and nostalgia for Queen Elizabeth I persists in Shakespeare's late plays.