Though the practice of solo singing and improvising continued well past the 1530s, sea changes in the politics and poetics of the peninsula after the Sack of Rome make this a reasonable point at which to conclude the book. This section will briefly explain those changes and how they altered the status and nature of poetic performance. I will also pose questions and suggestions about the course of the practice in the sixteenth century in relation to the rise of the madrigal and opera, extraordinary developments that I believe cannot be fully understood without a more comprehensive view of vernacular poetic performance in Renaissance Italy. The epilogue is structured around the consideration of a number of dualities: elite and popular, oral and written, lyric and epic, poet and composer, nature and artifice.