Part of the series The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, Rosalind Kerr's translation and edition of The Fake Husband (Il Finto Marito) offers students, readers, and scholars a bridge to a dynamic work of Italian Renaissance commedia dell'arte that has never appeared before in English. Based upon the theatrical scenario Il Marito (The Husband ), created and acted by the Gelosi acting troupe, this five-act drama is the adaptive work of the theater artist Flaminio Scala (1552–1624) and his seventeenth-century colleagues known as the Confidenti. The comedy delivers three romantic plots—two young aristocratic couples, and a pair of servants—who, with the help of the wily Scaramuccia and his bed-trick arrangements, overthrow two lascivious patriarchs. The finto marito of the play's title is none other than Brigida, who poses as a wealthy and jealous husband to the noblewoman Porzia as she awaits the return of her true love, Lepido. First printed in 1618 and acted contemporaneously, the play comments on marriage, female bonds, class dynamics, and the gendered powers of clothing, among other early modern cultural concerns.

Physically portable and accompanied by Kerr's introduction, The Fake Husband is a fine addition to classrooms, graduate or undergraduate, that deal with these early modern themes or address theatrical forms and their dynamic collaborative circumstances. As Kerr repeatedly notes, the comedy bears witness both to Scala's clever writing and to the brilliance of a disciplined ensemble cast performing the work. Whether or not the bond between Porzia and Brigida/Licinio represents, as the editor suggests, a lesbian marriage, the language of this play extends fresh analytical sites to early modernists interested in gender, sexuality, and trans studies.

Along with a summary of the play's plot and its two prologues, the volume's introduction provides valuable historical context for the play, offering up a picture of Scala's involvement in theater arts, his alchemical perfume shop in Venice, and his various dealings with his patron, Don Giovanni de’ Medici (1537–1621). In this section, one gets a sense of the cultural background informing the metatheatrical elements of the comedy; Scaramuccia can certainly be read as a stand-in for the playwright himself. A core interpretive remark made by Kerr is that The Fake Husband, by setting scenarios into a script, delivers to audiences the vital theatrical collaborations of the prior generation's Gelosi, an acting group that included women: Isabella Andreini and Sylvia Roncagli.

The interplay of page and stage receives some coverage in the introduction as well, for Scala was not only a savvy playwright and traveling theater artist, but also a figure concerned with the courtly legitimacy that print could lend to his plays, especially in Florence. Both The Fake Husband and Scala's 1611 collection of dramatic scenarios, Teatro delle Favole (Theater of Tales) represent this commitment. For all that is included in this account, some readers might come away longing for more insight on Scala's relationship to the press and the stationers responsible for disseminating his work to a broader public. (Rather than being described, for instance, photo reproductions of the printed editions’ frontispieces may have reached toward this goal.) It is stage performance that occupies the center of Kerr's introductory remarks, and the embodied view of it that she conjures is vibrant and deeply collaborative, sure to interest students and scholars of early modern Italian theater and European drama of the period more broadly.

It is worth emphasizing that Kerr's English version of The Fake Husband is the first. In her own words, the translation “makes possible a broader understanding of how commedia dell'arte developed from its beginnings as buffoonery to its maturity as a disciplined dramatic art form” (34). The translated text, which follows Laura Falavolti's 1982 edition in the original language, proceeds by way of sense-for-sense renderings in English. It opts for idiomatic terms, while preserving class distinctions among characters, all for the sake of meeting a modern reading audience. If the editor's lengthy explanatory notes at the foot of the page occasionally seem superfluous for some readers, others may appreciate the interpretive commentary, which holds a focus on several key themes: gender and sexuality, generational conflict, and meta-theater, among others.