ABSTRACT
This chapter implies, the prevalence of female laments in Italy's sung culture helped to sustain conventional ideas of womanhood. It describes a woman's tearful, anguished experience of contact with institutional heterosexuality hardly seems, to us, like a gracious or appropriate gesture for a marriage-related spectaclea such as Arianna. The chapter presents Arianna's fate as a warning to other women, it constituted a kind of boundary closed against the excesses of vocality that had gone before. Francesca Caccim was the most empowered female composer contemporary with Monteverdi, Rinuccini and the fountain-head of the lament tradition. Caccini's setting adds excess of still another kind to her Arianna's refraining romanesca performance, by adding ever more elaborate embellishments to the word 'troppo' at the end of successive stanzas. The brilliance of Caccini's response preserves the image of a complex, intelligent female subjectivity refusing to be split asunder, an image projected through the single singing body of an Arianna.
