The Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, A Lover's Complaint.

IN certain respects John Roe's New Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's poems marks a notable advance on F. T. Prince's 1960 Arden. Since what student readers probably turn to first is the critical introduction, it is pleasing to see the narrative poems here carefully located in the body of Shakespeare's early work, and appraised with some subtlety. Where Prince claimed that 'few English or American readers nowadays will respond to such happily wanton fancies as Venus and Adonis', Roe conveys rich appreciation of what he identifies as |both a tragic and a comic poem', whose tonal shifts are carefully modulated. Lucrece, likewise, dismissed by Prince as unreadable, is expouinded …