Shakespeare continued: Two Gentlemen of Verona with digital side effects

The biggest difficulty I had in reading The Two Gentlemen of Verona on my iPad was not the platform itself, but rather the plain dumb fact that much of the time, I couldn't understand what was being said. So by the second act I cheated and went to No Fear Shakespeare, a web site by Spark Notes that has the play with the modern translation side-by-side. This was exactly what I needed, and I was able to read the original most of the time, and defer to the modern version only occasionally so as to keep the momentum of reading.

The biggest downside of this is that No Fear Shakespeare is a web site, not an app, and furthermore the scenes are broken down into multiple pages between which one must navigate by tabs, which sometimes don't work properly. Thus one is scrolling around and clicking in the conventional way of the web, and furthermore the page refreshes at somewhat random but persistent intervals because of an add graphic that may or may not load properly, thus spontaneously shifting the text up or down, or causing it to flash out of existence entirely for a second or two without warning.

If Spark Notes made an app that furnished these translations, I would surely purchase it and use it. Instead they just get my crummy page view and advertising revenue, which is measly and nothing. So be it. But I made it my resolution to wean myself off No Fear Shakespeare as soon as possible.