To what extent and how did historians in the past know about civilizations that came centuries before them?{snip}Were people in Elizabethan England aware of Roman civilization and customs, or was it only in libraries and universities that it was being researched and preserved?

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- I'm not sure just who you're asking about here. Are you asking about "historians" or when you say "people" are you talking about some random "man on the street"?

In any case, for Elizabethan London, the answer is plain enough-- Shakespeare wrote for audiences who weren't "historians", and you'll see in plays like Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra that his stories come substantially from Plutarch's Lives. He's working from a translation by Thomas North, which was published in 1579 . . . but this translation wasn't from Plutarch's Greek, but rather from a translation into French by Jacques Aymot, completed by 1565.

While Plutarch was particularly influential and vivid for Elizabethan readers, it was hardly the only source of information. People thought a lot about Rome, and not just as "the past"-- they compared their present circumstances to Roman antecedents, as they understood them.

Paulina Kewes puts it:

The history and literature of ancient Rome pervaded the thought and imagination of Elizabethan England. Historians, politicians, divines, poets, and playwrights looked to the Roman past for guidance or inspiration. This was not a new phenomenon, but it was a rapidly widening one. The appearance of a great many translations of Roman texts was one reflection of the trend, the composition of original works about ancient Rome (including plays by Shakespeare and Jonson) another. Lessons of Roman history were a shaping influence on Elizabethan thinking about issues that were central to the age: among them the powers of the monarchy, the succession to the throne, the proprieties of colonial expansion and of empire, and the confessional clashes of Protestant and Catholic.

North's translation occurs at a time when reading is increasing in England, and you'd find that Shakespeare's characters weren't new to his audiences. Recall too that the New Testament is filled with detail about the Roman Empire, as are Lives of the Saints and other Christian material such as the works of St Augustine and Orosius. Latin was very much an active scholarly language-- academics wrote in Latin, and a random university student would likely be _more_ familiar with Roman texts than a non-Latin reading student today. Latin was the language of scholarly production, for example Isaac Newton's works were composed and printed in Latin.

All sorts of things that "people" knew about the Roman world might be inaccurate, but one didn't have to be a specialist to know something about it; and while some sources were new in the Elizabethan era, many had been familiar for centuries. The classical world was frequently referenced by authors -- long before the Elizabethan period, we've got Chaucer writing of Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare does too, obviously).

There were also historians, men had been investigating the past and recovering lost Roman material for centuries. This is a process that's often called "Renaissance humanism" -- you can think of Petrarch's discovery of Cicero's letters in the 14th century, for example.

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Sources:

Kewes, Paulina. “Henry Savile's Tacitus and the Politics of Roman History in Late Elizabethan England.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 74, no. 4, 2011, pp. 515–551.

J. Leeds Barroll. “Shakespeare and Roman History.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 53, no. 3, 1958, pp. 327–343.