The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Penguin Shakespeare)
Category: Kindle Store,Kindle eBooks,Literature & Fiction
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Penguin Shakespeare) Details
Leaving behind both home and beloved, a young man travels to Milan to meet his closest friend. Once there, however, he falls in love with his friend's new sweetheart and resolves to seduce her. Love-crazed and desperate, he is soon moved to commit cynical acts of betrayal. And comic scenes involving a servant and his dog enhance the play's exploration how passion can prove more powerful than even the strongest loyalty owed to a friend.
Reviews
This is a review of the Kindle ebook version of the Penguin Shakespeare "Two Gentlemen of Verona".I found the text itself to be well done, error-free and informative. So, it would be five stars on that account. However, the Kindle formatting for this is subpar. The dialogue is double-indented, which means that all but the shortest lines of dialogue are prone to wrapping unless you put the Kindle's text size on minumum. And that makes it quite difficult to discern the individual lines of dialogue (which is important because Shakespeare is written in lines of blank verse).The annotations were very helpful, but they're not set up in a helpful way. There are no endnote markers within the body of the play itself. Instead, the notes are listed in the final chapter of the ebook, each one there having a hyperlink to the line of the play that it refers to. This is precisely backward from how a normal reader would want to use the annotations. In a print book it's workable because you could keep a finger in the play text and a finger in the endnotes and flip back and forth, but Kindle has only a "back" button, not a "forward" button, so it's quite difficult to flip quickly between two sections like that. Moreover, the annotations seem to have been put into a table structure of some sort, which the Kindle has a hard time rendering, so that there's a significant delay each time you jump into the endnotes section. Occasionally the endnotes have links to other endnotes (e.g. "See the note for I.2.47-51"), and these are hyperlinked, but rather than linking to the note itself, they link to the play text, again exactly backwards from what would be helpful.In the end, I wound up loading the eBook into Kindle for Android on my phone, and reading the endnotes on my phone while at the same time reading the play on my Kindle.I would rate this version 3 stars because of these problems, but there aren't very many ebooks of Gentlemen of Verona available, and this is the best one I found which has annotations. If you're not interested in annotations, though, then there are versions available with better formatting.