Melissa Walter's The Italian Novella and Shakespeare's Comic Heroines is useful reading for scholars and students interested in the relationship between Shakespeare's comedies and the Italian novella tradition. The book is well structured and informed. In the introduction, Walter defines both the background of her research and the main points of her examination of the influence of the Italian and Italianate novella on the characterization of Shakespeare's female protagonists in his comedies. Walter demonstrates that the novella tradition—represented by Boccaccio's Decameron and Bandello's Novelle, and, in part, by their French and English imitators (such as Marguerite of Navarre, George Whetstone, and Barnabe Riche)—not only suggested to Shakespeare the plots for his comedies but also gave him a model for his heroines. In particular, Walter argues, the relevance that the Italian novella gave to women as subjects and speakers influenced Shakespeare's perception of femininity and female agency, inspiring him to create female characters endowed with rhetorical abilities and cleverness. Supporting this premise, in chapter 1 Walter demonstrates that the art of the conversation portrayed in the Decameron's frame tale and in Bandello's Novelle influenced The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and Much Ado about Nothing: fascinated by the novella's heroine's rhetorical skills and participation in elite conversation, Shakespeare tried to shape his comedies’ female protagonists according to the Italian model.

In the following six chapters, each devoted to a specific comedy, Walter discusses the different ways that Shakespeare exploited the motif of the trunk (or the casket), which he probably took from the Italian novella, giving it different meanings connected to the representation of femininity. In chapter 2 Walter focuses on the Merchant of Venice's casket test, suggesting that the casket represents Portia's body and, as a consequence, female commodification and confinement. In chapter 3 she deals with The Twelfth Night and analyses the trunk as a means employed to collect or hide things and, consequently, as a symbol of theatrical inventiveness, strongly connected with Viola and her ability to behave like an actress.

Chapter 4 is a brilliant analysis of the influence of the Italian novella on the definition of female agency in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where women resort to stratagems typical of the Italian novella in order to preserve their chastity and to punish male misbehavior—that is to say all the forms of male dominance over women, jealousy included. Shakespeare's heroines show that resorting to these stratagems does not compromise their reputation; on the contrary, these stratagems, employed with intelligence, correct men's improper attitude toward women.

With chapter 5 Walter moves to Shakespeare's Jacobean comedies, focusing first of all on the relations between Measure for Measure and its source, the story of Promos and Cassandra, which George Whetstone employed both in his eponymous comedy and in a tale included in An Heptamer of Civill Discourses (even though Whetstone himself drew on a plot already used by Giraldi Cinthio in a novella of the Ecatommiti and in the play Epitia). As Walter suggests, in Measure for Measure Shakespeare gives his audience an example of the commodification of female chastity, challenging in this way the habit of considering women as the family's or, in general, men's property. This thought-provoking representation of female condition is discussed also in chapter 6, devoted to All's Well That Ends Well. Here Walter analyzes Shakespeare's relation to the Decameron and Barnabe Riche's Italianate collection of tales, Farewell to Military Profession. Even though Walter's interpretation of Riche's Farewell as a piece of work that expresses its author's “resentment towards women” (124) is not persuasive, one may find interesting Walter's suggestions connected to the Decameron. She argues that Shakespeare resorted to the female model derived from the Italian novella in order to make his Helena an effective example of female agency.

Chapter 7 focuses on Cymbeline. According to Walter, in Cymbeline, inspired by Decameron 2.9, Shakespeare resorted to Boccaccio's teachings and refused to consider loss of chastity as the inevitable consequence of women's erotic readings or speeches, stressing at the same time the importance of female consent in love relationships.

In the conclusion, Walter makes a further meaningful suggestion—that it is possible to trace the influence of the Italian novella in other Shakespearian tragicomedies, such as Pericles and The Winter's Tale, which are not directly based on Italian models. This suggests that the Italian novella tradition has a seminal role in the development of Shakespeare's poetics. Finally, Walter includes a concise but useful appendix, “Italian and French Novellas in England,” wherein she lists English novellas, Italianate collections of tales, and plays based on Italian novellas or novellas’ plots.

Employing a comparative approach, Walter shows the importance of examining the connections between English and Italian literatures in order to understand Shakespeare's theatrical works. “Shakespeare's comedies,” she states, “took impetus from the novella tradition not only by borrowing plots, but also by a more thoroughgoing engagement with the conversations enacted in that tradition, with its styles of wit, and with its spatial poetics” (140). As this book proves, the reception of the Italian novella in early modern England represents a meaningful and still promising research field.