These three volumes in Ashgate's Anglo-Italian Renaissance Studies are a measure of the impressive range and quality of this series. Anthony Ellis's engagingly original subject is the way elderly characters in select English and Italian Renaissance comedies provide depth and substance to the social, political and economic contexts of the plays in which they are prominent. Starting with a chapter on senescence and melancholy in King Lear, a play taken as an archetypal treatment of old age, the book draws illuminatingly on modern and Renaissance writings on gerontology to compare the various purposes to which the presentation of old age is quarried by dramatists. Subsequent chapters provide a comparison of Bibbiena's Calandria and Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor; explore generational issues in relation to politics in Florentine cinquecento comedies; examine the gerontocracy that was Renaissance Venice through select plays of Andrea Calmo; compare and contrast treatments of the Pantalone mask in Flaminio Scala's gathering of commedia dell'arte scenarios Il teatro delle favole rappresentative; juxtapose Jonson's Alchemist and Dekker's Old Fortunatus; and close with a handling of old age in Shakespeare's The Tempest and Middleton's, Rowley's and Heywood's The Old Law.

Ellis has many perceptive points to make about other plays, Latin, Italian and English, notably those of Shakespeare, and particularly As You Like It. His detailed treatment of Calmo, a dramatist little attended to in English, is particularly welcome. The approach as a whole might easily have been dry and academic, but Ellis deploys his supportive early material – the familiar: Robert Burton, the Bacons; the more abstruse: Stephen Batman, Gabriele Paliotti – with skill, and this is a study from which not just critics and scholars, but also actors, can benefit. Not all his judgements persuade: in his Prologue to Mandragola Machiavelli laments that he is out of office, but does he really descend to ‘profound despair’? (p. 63) – I suspect the author was too wary so to expose himself, and the reference to office in the Prologue seems to be expressed in the same tone of wry irony as the allusions to place, and scenes and carping spectators. There is a detailed and illuminating study of the various depictions of Pantalone in Scala, and Ellis rightly says that conclusions cannot be carried over to scenari performed by troupes other than the Confidenti (p. 124). However, we do not know for certain that all these scenari were devised for the Confidenti, and also to be taken on board is the extent to which they may have been modified, and made more ‘literary’ for readers, and possibly for use by non-professional performers. Again, quite impossible to calculate are the ways individual actors interpreted the type in performance.

Graham Holderness offers a tight focus in Shakespeare and Venice, and this can claim to be the first book-length study of the subject. An introductory account of the past and present myths of Venice is followed by a chapter on Renaissance Venice, drawing on contemporary English and Italian texts, like William Thomas, Fynes Moryson and the Lewkenor translation of Contareno, and careful mining of the Italian materials gathered in the Chambers and Pullen documentary history. A third chapter explores the place of Jew and Moor in the Renaissance, followed by chapters on The Merchant and Othello, which draw out the thematic significances of both Jew and Moor as figures at once culturally alien to and yet deeply embedded in Venetian society. The comprehensiveness of the volume is rounded out by chapters on Shakespeare's Venice in fiction and in film. This is a searching, judicious and persuasive account of the two plays, and while not everyone will agree with all of Holderness's readings, few will fail to benefit from an account that eschews modish emphases and scrupulously documents its arguments.

The third book is a collection of essays on the influence of Italian culture on Elizabethan and early Stuart drama edited by Michele Marrapodi, who has been in the forefront of the recent resurgence of interest in Anglo-Italian Renaissance studies. This volume includes seventeen essays and an introduction by Professor Marrapodi that elaborates on the three areas of radical revaluation signalled in the subtitle, underscoring a shift of emphasis from traditional text, source or analogue detecting ‘to a larger process of cultural influence, mostly operating unconsciously’ (p. 1). Shakespeare is at the centre of most of the essays, twelve or more being concerned in various ways with Italian links to his plays. Wider-ranging studies include a highly informed and informative exploration of scripted and devised pastoral and allied plays by Louise George Clubb and a piece by Marrapodi on the comedies, while Keir Elam reinvigorates a rather well-worn topic by drawing attention to the paramount influence of Florio's dialogic method on Italian elements in Shakespeare. These essays are supported by studies of Gascoigne's Supposes, Marston's The Malcontent and a piece on Shakespeare and Venice. The collection ends with a Coda by the Italian doyen of Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama studies Giorgio Melchiori, skilfully proposing ‘Italian music as imaginative stimulus to the creation of English verse drama’ (p. 241).

It is a rich collection of tightly argued pieces. The commedia dell'arte could have been more widely covered, as Marrapodi notes that ‘the Italian influence of theatrical practices is most pervasive in relation to Commedia dell'Arte types’ (p. 9). There are various – all excellent – references to this practice but there is little or no consideration of what is meant by the term the commedia dell'arte in the context of English drama in the period, no comment on the very limited evidence for the presence of Italian professional acting companies in England, and no attempt to address the tendency of many Elizabethan and Stuart writers to view the Italian theatre as essentially a species of what Ben Jonson called ‘the old pantomimi’. However, this is a minor cavil, and Ashgate is to be commended for publishing both this and the other two volumes, all three of which are of high standard and merit a wide readership.