Section 7 of ceremony

Summary

Tayo tells Betonie about Emo, suggesting that maybe Emo is right: maybe the whites have taken everything from the Indians. But Betonie explains that first of all the whites only think they own the land, but in fact no one can own the land. Then he explains that the whites are only the invention of Indian witchcraft and tells the story of how at a great conference of witches white people were created and let loose on the earth like a plague.

Tayo, Betonie, and Shush ride to the foothill of the Chuska Mountains to spend the night in a small hogan. Looking around, Tayo realizes that he is in the highest spot in the world, measured not in miles but in importance.

Betonie tells the story of a young man who goes off to hunt deer and is captured by Coyote. His family goes after him and finds him, but he has been almost completely taken over by Coyote. They take him to the Bear People, who help them to perform a ceremony to save the young man. As he tells the story of the ceremony, Betonie performs the same ceremony for Tayo, painting a picture of the ceremony of which he tells, with Tayo sitting in the middle of it. Shush and Betonie chant prayers of Tayo as they cut his scalp, and they sing about his journey away and their hopes for him to come back. After that first portion of the ceremony, they bring him into the hogan for the night and feed him Indian tea. Tayo dreams about Josiah's speckled cattle.

Tayo awakens, and Betonie sits near him and tells him a story of long ago. The Indians knew something was wrong and rode around, until a group of young men found a light-skinned Mexican girl with hazel eyes tied up in a tree. They took her down and, knowing that they should not, brought her home. Then they realized they had to send her back but did not know how, so they brought her to the medicine man, Betonie's grandfather Descheeny. He told her he would not touch her and would send her home, but she replied that her people would not accept her back, so he took her as a wife. His other wives were upset because their traditions dictated that they should not touch "alien things," so Descheeny moved with her to a winter house below the mountains.

Descheeny knew she would come before she arrived, and he decided that he needed to work together with her in order to create a ceremony that could cure the world of the whites, who were working to end the world. Descheeny realized that now they all needed to work together, even making use of things from the whites. The Mexican girl also had come to work with Descheeny. She was the daughter of a Spaniard and Root Woman. When they saw the color of her eyes, they left her to die on a trash pile and made Root Woman leave the village. Root woman left, but she took the girl with her.

Fly and Hummingbird come back to the people for tobacco for old Buzzard, but there is no tobacco, so they go back to the fourth world below and ask their mother where they can get tobacco. She tells them to go ask caterpillar.

Analysis

Betonie's story of the invention of whites completely shifts the hierarchy in which people are seen. Not only are whites part of the Native American world, they are in invention of it and, furthermore, a malicious invention of its witches. Thus although whites wield a certain destructive power over Native Americans and the world, they are placed in a completely inferior status, not created equally with the Native Americans and all other people of color. If they are an invention of the Native Americans, they can also control the whites and their destruction. But this does not mean that whites can be the simple pawns of Native Americans. Even the witches who created them do not know how to eradicate them. Betonie can only work out a ceremony that will stop their destructive power.

Betonie's simultaneous telling of the story of an old ceremony and performing of a new ceremony confirms the words of the poems at the beginning of the novel, which stated that stories contain, and are themselves, ceremonies.

The story of Betonie's grandfather, Descheeny, confirms the alliances between Mexicans and Native Americans. The character of Root Woman shows that Mexicans are in fact of partially Native American ancestry. The Mexican girl is not just a tool that Descheeny uses in his ceremony; she has come to find him as much as he has come to find her, and they collaborate in the ceremony. The Mexican girl is the second in the series of powerful women figures in the novel. She stands on equal ground with Descheeny from the moment she mocks his offer of protection when she is first brought to him. This is a woman who needs the collaboration, not the protection, of a man.

Like Tayo and Night Swan, Betonie and the Mexican girl have hazel eyes. In addition to being biologically viable, the presence of the marker of difference in the eyes in particular is of great symbolic importance. The particular color of these characters' eyes is also symbolic. Hazel is green-brown color, mixed between a light color common to the eyes of whites and a dark color common to the eyes of Native Americans. We find not only light eyes on a dark face as a marker of mixed ancestry, but mixed eyes in a dark face, a doubling of the markers of mixing.

Eyes themselves have great symbolic value. Eyes are often considered the windows to the soul, and, thus, mixed color eyes would reflect a soul which truly combines the various cultures. Eyes are of course the agents of sight, of visual perception. What one sees with dictates of what one sees and how one sees it. With hazel eyes, these characters are able to see, to perceive, and to understand both the white and the Native American worlds. They perceive both worlds simultaneously as insiders and as outsiders to them, allowing them to comprehend their positive and negative aspects.

Section 8 of ceremony

Summary

The Mexican woman bore Descheeny a girl child, who she gave to Descheeny's daughters to raise. In time, the girl child bore a child of her own, Betonie, who was raised by his grandmother the Mexican woman.

Tayo feels that the ceremony has begun to cure him, but Betonie warns that in order for a true cure the ceremony will have to continue for a long time. When Tayo tries to pay Betonie, Betonie refuses the money and tells Tayo, "This has been going on for a long time now. It's up to you. Don't let them stop you. Don't let them finish off this world."

Tayo leaves Betonie's the next morning. He rides with a trucker a little way. When he gets out at a gas station to buy some food, Tayo sees white people clearly for the first time in his life. He decides to walk home, but after a few minutes Harley and Leroy drive by and stop to pick him up. They have been drinking and carry bottles of wine and beer along with a woman from another tribe, Helen Jean. At first, Tayo resists their offers of wine and leans out the window watching grasshoppers but after a while he joins in, trying to feel nothing. The go to the Y bar and continue drinking. Helen Jean begins flirting with a Mexican sitting at another table. When she leaves to join him, Tayo is the only one sober enough to notice.

Helen Jean is from Towac. She went to Gallup to find a job and make money to help out her family, but although she knows how to type, she is only offered a job cleaning a movie theater for seventy-five cents an hour and cannot even afford to pay rent for her room. Then her boss begins to expect sexual favors, and she quits. Desperately in search of someone who can loan her rent money, she goes to the bars in town she knows the Indians hang out at, and they invite her in to have a drink with them. She tries to continue looking for work but is drawn back to the bars where they guys are always happy to see her, to tell her their war stories and to help her out with a little money at the end of the night. At first she tries to hold out and not have sex with the men in return for the money, but she is not able to withstand their advances for long. She promises herself that this time with the Mexican will be different.

Tayo falls asleep at the bar and is woken when Leroy and Harley get into a fight. He puts them into the truck and drives them home. On the way, Harley throws up, and Leroy urinates. When he stops the car Tayo gags and vomits, trying to rid himself of all of his past. The scalp ceremony rids Tayo of the memories of the Japanese that have been haunting him, but not of everything to which he has been exposed. Like in an ancient story, just having touched and seen certain things can haunt you. Tayo decides to try to follow some of Betonie's advice and to figure out how to call himself back to his people.

A long poem tells of Ck'o'yo Kaup'a'ta the gambler who tricked everyone who came his way into losing his or her life. He even captured the rain clouds, which he could not kill, but which he could keep prisoner. After three years their father the sun went looking for them. He finds his grandmother Spider Woman who tells him how to outsmart the gambler, and the Sun wins back his children, the clouds.

Tayo ends up at a woman's house. He tells her he is looking for his uncle's cattle. She allows him to water his horse and invites him in for supper. She tells him he can see the stars that night. Tayo had waited all summer until September when he saw the stars Betonie had told him about. He had followed them to this place, and when he stepped out on the porch he saw them.

Analysis

Although most of the novel is focused on the particular experiences of Native American men after World War II, a few vignettes, the one in a previous section of a mother and son in Gallup, and this one of Helen Jean also consider the specifics of women's situations. While the men have to deal with the aftermath of their experience as soldiers, and often with alcoholism, the women confront abject poverty where often their only resource is their own bodies. While the men who leave the reservation may find work, albeit greatly underpaid, doing menial or hard labor, the women are not even offered that much. Most often, although they leave the reservation with the best intentions of finding a decent job and sending money back home to help, they find that the only work they can obtain is prostitution. The stories of the women are not developed in any length, but their presence in the novel shows a concern for the range of experiences of men and women, and for the ways in which femininity as well as masculinity are affected by the contact between Native American and white cultures.

Although Tayo has embarked on a ceremony, his transformation is slow and incomplete and does not separate him completely from his past life. Tayo's joining up again with Harley and Leroy is representative of the situations throughout the novel where it is often difficult to separate the good from the bad. In fact, most situations have both positive and negative aspects that cannot be separated from one another. In this case, the friendship Harley and Leroy offer Tayo is a wonderful thing, contributing to his sense of belonging in his community and to his understanding that his reaction to the war is a common one. However, Harley and Leroy are not able to move beyond their drinking to find a true cure for themselves, and they draw Tayo back into their escape mechanism. And then, as they show Tayo the end result of their resorting to alcohol—a total lack of self control—Harley and Leroy point him back onto the right path.

The story of the gambler demonstrates that no single party is to blame in the creation of a bad situation. The gambler is only able to play with those who are willing to gamble. People are shown to be willing to gamble when they feel that they have nothing left to lose. Although he kills them, in that very act the gambler shows them that they still possessed something of value. While he is powerful, the gambler is not invincible, and with the right tools he too can be tricked.

The woman at whose house Tayo spends the night is the last of the key women figures in the novel. In this scene and in the next in which she appears, she is not given a name. In this way, she acquires a more universal, symbolic value. She is not just one particular woman, but, as she is simply called "the woman," she is representative of all women and embodies all womanhood. Tayo notes her resemblance to an antelope, which again reinforces her symbolic value: she is also the spirit of female animals. Although she feeds and houses Tayo, the woman is in no way subservient to him.

Section 9 of ceremony

Summary

Hummingbird and Fly visit Caterpillar, who gives them tobacco.

Tayo and the woman make love. He dreams of the cattle. They awake before dawn, and Tayo feels happy to be alive. After feeding his horse and singing to the sunrise, he eats the breakfast the woman serves him, watching her bundle together rocks and plants. Tayo thanks her and leaves. He rides up into the mountains, where the Laguna people have always hunted, thinking of the old stories. Now only a small portion of the area belongs to the reservation. White farmers graze their cattle on most of the mountains, and Tayo rides through them. He is searching for Josiah's cattle, the cattle of his dreams, following Betonie's directions. Betonie told him to follow the stars to the woman and up the mountain to the cattle. Tayo carries the bill of sale, so he can prove the cattle are his as he drives them home to follow through with Josiah's plans.

Finally, Tayo reaches the white man Floyd Lee's enormous metal and barbed wire fence and sees Josiah's cattle. After dark, Tayo cuts through the fence, thinking about how hard it is for him to believe that a white man would steal his cattle because he has come to believe the lie that white people are better than Indians and Mexicans. Tayo looks for the cattle for hours, until he sees daybreak near and begins to lose hope and to lose faith in Betonie and in the old ways. As he falls to the ground, a mountain lion approaches him. Tayo sings to the mountain lion, who the hunter's helper. The mountain lion stops and then goes on its way. Tayo pours pollen into the mountain lion's tracks, and follows the direction it came from. He stops to watch the sun rise, and when he turns to get back on his horse, he sees Josiah's cattle. He directs them easily toward the hole in the fence. Suddenly, Tayo notices two men who patrol the land riding towards him. He tries to outrun them, but his mare stumbles on the rocky terrain. Just before he hits the ground, Tayo sees the last of the cattle exiting through the hole in the fence; the patrol men have not noticed. They take Tayo and plan to bring him back to their boss, when they notice the mountain lion tracks. Preferring to bring home a mountain lion than an Indian, the patrol men leave Tayo. Badly hurt, he rests for a day, worrying about how the white men are destroying the animals and the earth. The snow begins to fall. Tayo heads back home, relieved that the snow will cover the mountain lion's tracks, as well as the cattle's, and the hole in the fence.

As he walks, Tayo meets a hunter, singing a Laguna hunting song, although he is not Laguna. They talk and walk together back to the woman's house where the hunter and the woman perform the rituals of respect for the deer he has shot. Soon, the snow stops, and Tayo finds that his horse made her way back to the house without him. The hunter also tells him that the woman has his cattle, which she caught in an old Indian corral. Tayo is uncomfortable because he thinks the hunter must be the woman's husband. He checks his cattle, which she explains have been used in Texas roping tournaments, and heads home, promising to come back for the cattle. When Tayo returns with Robert and a cattle truck to get the cattle, they find the house abandoned, but the cattle well cared for.

A few months later, Grandma comments that Tayo is cured, and he agrees. Auntie waits, mistrusting the cure. Every night, Tayo dreams of the woman. During the days, he helps Robert in the fields and on the ranch and checks on the cattle and the sheep. In the spring, he tells them he will go to the ranch to stay, so he can look after the cattle and the new calves. As Tayo leaves, Grandma tells him the old man Ku'oosh came by and told her Tayo would soon go talk to him because he would have something to say to him.

Alone at the ranch, Tayo realizes that his nightmares after his return from the war were due to his incredible sense of loss, but that in fact nothing had been lost because the mountains and the people you love can never be lost. He goes out looking for the cattle and meets the woman, who tells him she is camped by the spring. He follows her up there, and they talk about her family; she is a Monta-o and is called Ts'eh, although her real name, which she does not tell him, is much longer.

Analysis

Just as Fly and Hummingbird come to a point where they are able to shift from searching for what they need to bringing something back to its right place, Tayo recognizes that he has found the signs of which Betonie told him. He then begins the process of bringing the cattle and himself back to his people. Here, the woman is symbolically analogous () to Caterpillar. Like Caterpillar who knows how to find the tobacco Fly and Hummingbird need, the woman finds and prepares sacred herbs.

Now that he is on the path of the ceremony and is willing to accept help, people and animals show up to help him on a regular basis. After the woman has fed him, the mountain lion shows him the way to the cattle, the snow covers his tracks, and the hunter leads him back down the mountain. Like the woman who is symbolic of all women and all female power through her lack of name, the hunter is symbolic of all Native American men and Native American masculinity, as he is only referred to as "the hunter" and speaks so many languages and embodies so many physical types that Tayo cannot tell from what tribe he is. In addition, the two acquire an even more magical or symbolic quality as Tayo perceives that they are husband and wife, and yet the hunter seems to know about the night Tayo and the woman have spent together and not mind. Even when the woman tells Tayo her name, her specification that it is not her real name leaves her identity vaguely mystical.

The contrast between Tayo's reaction to the mountain lion and the patrolmen's reaction to it is striking. Tayo honors the mountain lion and takes only what it offer him, while the patrol men set out to hunt and kill it not because they desperately need it to survive, but for the approval it will gain them in the eyes of their boss and the townspeople. For the patrol men, Tayo and the mountain lion are almost the same: both are prey for them to hunt down and bring back to their boss. They only choose the mountain lion over Tayo because the mountain lion is more rare.

Finding the cattle and returning with them allows Tayo to finally completely return home. As he carries out Josiah's plans, he becomes a full member of his family for the first time in his life. With a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, and an understanding of the ways in which everything in the world is interrelated and possesses both negative and positive elements, he is cured. He has also learned to trust his dreams as providing him with signs, instead of fearing them as intruding on his life. And in that way he is able to straighten out the confusion he feels between dreams and reality, not by separating them more, but by accepting their connections. The rain, however, has not yet returned to the land, and the mystery of the woman has not yet been solved, so the ceremony, and the story, must continue.

Section 10 of Ceremony

Summary

Tayo follows the woman as she gathers plants and explains their uses to him. He watches the cattle with a bull Robert saved from the rodeo. Tayo and the woman spend the summer together. She gathers all of the plants she needs except for one, which is not ready yet. She shows it to Tayo so he can gather it for her in case she is not there any more when it is ready. At the end of the summer, Robert comes by and warns Tayo that Emo has been spreading rumors about Tayo being crazy and that the people are concerned. Tayo does not follow his suggestion to go back home. Tayo and the woman talk about the destruction and the ceremony he is performing in order to stop it. They visit an old abandoned sacred place in the area. Then she tells him that Emo and the white police are coming after him to take him back to the hospital. She tells him that if he hides for long enough the white police will give up, but Emo will be a different story. She has to leave, and Tayo helps her to pack.

Tayo goes from one hiding place to the next, evading the men who are after him. As she predicted, the whites soon give up. Tayo tries to hitchhike a ride and is picked up by Leroy and Harley. Tayo thinks they have come through for him as friends; it is almost too late when he realizes that they are only capturing him for Emo. Tayo runs off again to an abandoned uranium mine in the hills. There, he notices the patterns left from mining the uranium, and he realizes that he has come to the last station in the ceremony. If he can complete that night, the ceremony will be complete.

Soon, Emo arrives in a car with Pinkie and Leroy. Tayo watches from a hiding place as they make a bonfire and beat the car; part of the ceremony of destruction. Then they pull Harley from the trunk. Emo is punishing him for having let Tayo go and is trying to get Tayo back by torturing his friend. Tayo almost runs out to kill Emo, when a great gust of wind builds up the fire and sends Leroy and Pinkie to the ground, bringing Tayo back to his senses. Finally, the men put Harley back into the trunk and leave.

Tayo walks back home, stopping to gather and to replant the seeds that the woman needs. In the story of Hummingbird and Fly, they give Buzzard the tobacco; Buzzard purifies the town, and the rain returns. The Corn woman tells them to remember how difficult it is to fix things, so that they will be more careful next time.

Tayo sits in the kiva with Ku'oosh and the other elders and tells them the story of his ceremony. They question him, especially asking about the woman. Then they sing and chant that he has seen A'moo'ooh, the spirit of the she-elk, and that they will be blessed again. They perform a ceremony on Tayo, so that at last

"Every evil which entangled him was cut to pieces."

Harley and Leroy are found dead in a ditch and are buried with full military honors. Auntie finally treats Tayo like a full member of the family. When they hear that Emo has killed Pinkie, old Grandma says, "It seems like I already heard these stories before—only thing is, the names sound different.

A poem tells how the witchery is dead for now, and the novel ends with a short poem alone on the last page:

"Sunrise, accept this offering, Sunrise."

Analysis

Ts'eh's status as a symbolic, mythical creature is confirmed, as she predicts what will happen to Tayo and how he can avoid capture. In this, she is like the Spider Woman who explained to the Sun how to retrieve his children, the clouds, from the gambler. Then when Tayo tells Ku'oosh and the other elders of her, they explain that she is the mythical A'moo'ooh and that the hunter is the mountain lion.

Betonie had explained to Tayo that in order to cure the new illnesses, new ceremonies were needed and that since the illnesses included the influence of the whites, the ceremonies would also need to make use of objects from the whites. The uranium mine represents this element. It represents the relationship of the whites to the earth. They think that they can take possession of it, take what they need from it, and then leave it, without offering anything in return and without completing any ceremonies. As Tayo incorporates the abandoned mine into his ceremony, he reincorporates that part of land, and symbolically all of the land that he whites have claimed, into the Native American tradition and into the reservation.

Tayo is performing the ceremony not only for himself, but also for all of the men who went to the war and for all of his people who are affected by the contact between different cultures and who are afflicted by the drought. He is not, however, able to save everyone. In order to complete the ceremony, Tayo must also accept that a certain element of loss is a part of life. He must not become completely dispirited by the failure of Harley and Leroy to stand up for him in the face of Emo, and he must stand by while Harley is tortured to death. This latter is almost too much for him. But just when he is about to give in, the natural elements come to his aid, reminding him that the people and the community he now belongs to include the animals, the earth, and the elements, which will always be with him.

Although we do not see the rain return to the Laguna land, we know that it will through the parallel that has been established with the story of Hummingbird and Fly. Since they complete their ceremony and see the rain return, we know that the same will happen for Tayo. Although Tayo had to go out and meet another medicine man and make use of many things from outside of the Laguna tradition, he ends his ceremony with Ku'oosh and the elders of his home town. Everything in the novel comes full circle with this return, and the last three lines of the book repeat the first line, corresponding to Tayo's comment on the first morning he woke up with Ts'eh that "the Dawn people began and ended all their words with 'sunrise'."

The English Renaissance

The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the early 16th century to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that many cultural historians believe originated in northern Italy in the 14th century. This era in English cultural history is sometimes referred to as "the age of Shakespeare" or "the Elizabethan era", the first period in English and British history to be named after a reigning monarch.

Poets such as Edmund Spenser and John Milton produced works that demonstrated an increased interest in understanding English Christian beliefs, such as the allegorical representation of the Tudor Dynasty in The Faerie Queen and the retelling of mankind’s fall from paradise in Paradise Lost; playwrights, such as Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, composed theatrical representations of the English take on life, death, and history. Nearing the end of the Tudor Dynasty, philosophers like Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon published their own ideas about humanity and the aspects of a perfect society, pushing the limits of metacognition at that time. England came closer to reaching modern science with the Baconian Method, a forerunner of the Scientific Method.

Slow transition and mixture
The steadfast English mind clung to the old order of things, and relinquished with reluctance the last relics of a style that had been for centuries a part of its life. If it must have the Egg-and-dart, it would keep the Tudor rose too. Thus all the Renaissance that came into England, after the bloody Wars of the Roses made it possible to think of art and luxury, paid toll to the Gothic on the way, and the result was a singular miscellany, for its Gothic had now forgotten, and its Renaissance had never known why it had existed. It is rather the talent with which the medley of material was handled, the broad masses, yet curious elaboration, and the scale of magnificence, that give the style its charm rather than anything in its original and bastard composition.[1]

Something of this same charm is to be found in most of the literature of the era, in accordance with that subtle relationship existing between the literature and the art of any period. It is in the lawless mixture of Gothic and Grecian characterizing the Elizabethan that Shakespeare peoples his A Midsummer Night's Dream with Gothic fairies reveling in the Athenian forest, and poet Edmund Spenser fills his pages with a pageantry of medieval monsters and classic masks. Shakespeare is a peculiar product of the Renaissance. The machinery of The Tempest and the setting of The Merchant of Venice are direct results of its spirit.[1]

Comparison of the English and Italian Renaissances
The English Renaissance is different from the Italian Renaissance in several ways. The dominant art forms of the English Renaissance were literature and music. Visual arts in the English Renaissance were much less significant than in the Italian Renaissance. The English period began far later than the Italian, which is usually considered to begin with Dante, Petrarch and Giotto in the early 1300s, and was moving into Mannerism and the Baroque by the 1550s or earlier. In contrast, the English Renaissance can only be said to begin, shakily, in the 1520s, and continued until perhaps 1620.

The Italian and English Renaissances were similar in sharing a specific musical aesthetic. In the late 16th century Italy was the musical center of Europe, and one of the principal forms which emerged from that singular explosion of musical creativity was the madrigal. In 1588, Nicholas Yonge published in England the Musica transalpina—a collection of Italian madrigals that had been Anglicized — an event which began a vogue of madrigal in England which was almost unmatched in the Renaissance in being an instantaneous adoption of an idea, from another country, adapted to local aesthetics. (In a delicious irony of history, a military invasion from a Catholic country – Spain – failed in that year, but a cultural invasion from another Catholic county, Italy, succeeded). English poetry was exactly at the right stage of development for this transplantation to occur, since forms such as the sonnet were uniquely adapted to setting as madrigals: indeed, the sonnet was already well-developed in Italy. Composers such as Thomas Morley, the only contemporary composer to set Shakespeare, and whose work survives, published collections of their own, roughly in the Italian manner but yet with a unique Englishness; many of the compositions of the English Madrigal School remain in the standard repertory in the 21st century.

The colossal polychoral productions of the Venetian School had been anticipated in the works of Thomas Tallis, and the Palestrina style from the Roman School had already been absorbed prior to the publication of Musical transalpina, in the music of masters such as William Byrd.

While the Classical revival led to a flourishing of Italian Renaissance architecture, architecture in Britain took a more eclectic approach. Elizabethan architecture retained many features of the Gothic, even while the occasional building such as the tomb in the Henry VII Lady Chapel at Westminster Abbey, or the French-influenced architecture of Scotland showed interest in the new style.

Criticisms of the idea of the English Renaissance
The notion of calling this period "The Renaissance" is a modern invention, having been popularized by the historian Jacob Burckhardt in the nineteenth century. The idea of the Renaissance has come under increased criticism by many cultural historians, and some have contended that the "English Renaissance" has no real tie with the artistic achievements and aims of the northern Italian artists (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello) who are closely identified with the Renaissance. Indeed, England had already experienced a flourishing of literature over 200 years before the time of Shakespeare when Geoffrey Chaucer was working. Chaucer's popularizing of English as a medium of literary composition rather than Latin was only 50 years after Dante had started using Italian for serious poetry. At the same time William Langland, author of Piers Plowman, and John Gower were also writing in English. The Hundred Years' War and the subsequent civil war in England known as the Wars of the Roses probably hampered artistic endeavor until the relatively peaceful and stable reign of Elizabeth I allowed drama in particular to develop.[1] Even during these war years, though, Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte D'Arthur, was a notable figure. For this reason, scholars find the singularity of the period called the English Renaissance questionable; C. S. Lewis, a professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and Cambridge, famously remarked to a colleague that he had "discovered" that there was no English Renaissance, and that if there had been one, it had "no effect whatsoever"

Historians have also begun to consider the word "Renaissance" as an unnecessarily loaded word that implies an unambiguously positive "rebirth" from the supposedly more primitive Middle Ages. Some historians have asked the question "a renaissance for whom?," pointing out, for example, that the status of women in society arguably declined during the Renaissance. Many historians and cultural historians now prefer to use the term "early modern" for this period, a neutral term that highlights the period as a transitional one that led to the modern world, but does not have any positive or negative connotations.

Other cultural historians have countered that, regardless of whether the name "renaissance" is apt, there was undeniably an artistic flowering in England under the Tudor monarchs, culminating in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
Major English Renaissance figures

Francis Bacon
Thomas Dekker
John Donne
John Fletcher
John Ford
Ben Jonson
Thomas Kyd
Christopher Marlowe
Phillip Massinger
Thomas Middleton
John Milton
Sir Thomas More
Thomas Nashe
William Rowley
William Shakespeare
James Shirley
Sir Philip Sidney
Edmund Spenser
John Webster
Sir Thomas Wyatt

Thomas Tallis, Thomas Morley, and William Byrd were the most notable English musicians of the time, and are often seen as being a part of the same artistic movement that inspired the above authors. Elizabeth herself, a product of Renaissance humanism trained by Roger Ascham, wrote occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure at critical moments of her life.