Shakespeare Pro App

Shakespeare Pro

The Shakespeare Pro iPad app —

Pretty sure, not totally, but pretty sure this was one of the very first apps I bought for the iPad. Useful? At first, it was more novelty, and I carried it around on my phone for a spell, too, but that was even less useful. Felt cumbersome on a phone. I used it, exactly once, in three, four years, on the phone to validate a quote.

Feels slick — in some ways — on the iPad.

The section that deals with the various portraits of the Bard, that’s a smart encapsulation of recent scholarship with decent graphics of the photos and frauds over the years.

The collected works section — the reason I bought it in the first place — currently contains 41 plays, which would mean Shakespeare’s apocrypha, in my training and understanding, 37 plays with one missing, the lost Cardino.

Edward III, Two Noble Kinsmen, and Love’s Labors Found are the titles that come to my mind. As a funny aside, Google misdiagnosed my typing one time, and kept spinning me around to a Henry 3, not the play I was looking for. Those silly search engines, second-guessing scholarly pursuits.

The app itself offers the usual, slightly bland interpretation of the works. Standard scholarly stuff, like the Monarch Notes version. Not bad for a quick glance. I still prefer my classic texts, but in a hurry, and seriously, an iPad is lighter than any single epic reference text I’ve got, so as a quick touch-point, it’s handy.