In choosing this title to address the topic of style change in music in the late sixteenth century, my intention is to suggest the apparent suddenness with which the early Baroque style appeared on the musical scene around the turn of the century. Furthermore, in its evocation of the dramatic, the title is suited to a style that burst on the scene in the new, essentially dramatic forms of monody (or solo song) and opera. If one observes the prospect from the brink of such a precipitous style change, however, one's retrospective view is complicated by entangled paths leading from various corners of the Renaissance landscape roughly to their convergence at the spot on which the viewer stands, at the entry into the Baroque. The purpose of this paper is not to chart new paths but to explore and describe some of those which have already been well traveled by music historians and others in search of explanations of style change. Certain signposts beckon more intriguingly than others—madrigal, monody, linguistics, mannerism—and these will mark the principal routes of our investigation.

Current methodological trends now influence the study of most literature, but as I shall argue, in the future they may alter radically the study of Elizabethan prose fiction. Some works of literature, especially the major ones, may be enjoyed by readers in any age, but many, perhaps now most, depend on literary criticism to be properly understood and fully appreciated. At one time Milton's Paradise Lost was a popular work, requiring of its readers only that their lives be grounded in the Bible to ensure their full response to it. For most readers today, an adequate response to Milton's poem is a product of the historical scholarship and the New Criticism practiced mostly in America in the first half of the twentieth century.

Montaigne scholarship has traditionally drawn its impetus from the identification of life and work and its sense of the overwhelming presence of Montaigne as the subject of his text. Bolstered by the essayist's own protestations of sincerity, of good faith and mutual trust between writer and reader, scholars have read the first-person discourse as affirming the truth of the “I” inside the writing and its unequivocal coincidence with its historical referent. The authorial voice announcing itself as self-portraiture, bearing its own name, has been taken to represent the man, his character and ideas, and to reflect the broader sixteenth-century intellectual and social context.

This long-standing reading practice, with its conviction of mimesis, has undoubtedly achieved useful biographical and historical results. Scholars interested in the evolution of Montaigne's thought have shed light on his mode of composition through textual accretion by studying the successive additions and emendations which are identified as strata in the body of the work: A(1580, 1582), B(1588), C(after 1588).