Rhetoric in Renaissance music.

Hello, paper is about how composers of the Renaissance expressed melancholy on their compositions. It has to provide an overview about what is melancholy, how it was treated throughout history of arts and music and then narrow to the Renaissance time and precisely to the Elizabethan period. That would be like background information but then it comes the more specific musical content coz I will have to analyze a piece of instrumental music(only played by instruments, not sung) that was composed based on a song(sung, tho) and show how the composer put melancholy on it, how the composer became the melancholic text in melancholic music, making use,in order to achieve it, of rethorical devices that were established by a XVII theorist. Would you be able to handle it?