ABSTRACT
One of the great accomplishments of seventeenth-century culture was the development of a vocabulary by means of which dramatic characters and actions could be delineated in music. Monteverdi's descriptions of how he invented the semiotics of madness for La fihta pazza Licori or of war for the Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda reveal how very self-consciously he designed methods for 'representing' affective states. The seventeenth-century composer writing dramatic music immediately confronted the problem of gender construction — how to depict men and women in the medium of music. Monteverdi has the difficult task of creating music for this moment that is lovely yet self-deprecating, that lacks rhetorical force but charms us all the more for that lack. Tomlinson argues in Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance that by this moment in the seventeenth century, humanist rhetoric had lost its authority and had gradually been replaced by the fetishised imagery of Marino and his followers.
