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Shakespeare, William. The Poems. Ed. John Roe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (The New Cambridge Shakespeare), 2006. xvi + 309 pp. £40.00/$60.00 (hardback); £7.99/$14.99 (paperback). ISBN 0–521–85551–9/67162–0, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 44, Issue 1, January 2008, Page 99, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm155
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This is a lightly revised version of an edition that first appeared in 1992, four years before the New Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. The most distinctive feature of this series is that it prints A Lover's Complaint among the poems, despite its having shared a volume with the Sonnets in 1609. This decision, Roe admitted in 1992, “may well strike some readers as obstinate, or at least unduly conservative”. Does it strike similar readers differently fourteen years later? Not surprisingly, granted the practical awkwardness involved in changing his mind, Roe leaves things pretty much as he finds them by concluding once more that A Lover's Complaint is by Shakespeare (or else why print it at all?) while not accepting that its appearance alongside the Sonnets in 1609 proves that it forms part of a complex but single work. This remains a sensible conclusion, but Colin Burrow's decision in his Oxford Shakespeare edition of The Complete Sonnets and Poems (2002) to print all of Shakespeare's poems in a single volume has surely stolen everyone's thunder.
