In June 2008 I was invited by the chair of the MLA committee on the New Variorum Shakespeare to take over the editing of their volume devoted to the poems, together with Dieter Mehl, Professor emeritus at the University of Bonn. The volume in question is to succeed and update Hyder Edward Rollins’s generally praised and very thorough New Variorum Edition of 1938. It includes Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Passionate Pilgrim, The Phoenix and the Turtle and The Lover’s Complaint.