Electronic Shakespeare

When you read on a tablet, you don't feel the heft of the physical book, the feeling that the end is in sight as the stack of unread pages on your right (with an English book) gets smaller, and the bulk of read pages on your left gets bigger. I knew that when I got to The Tempest, I was close to the end, and I was surprised to find out that Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, and Troilus and Cressida still awaited me. Unless another play is hiding behind Troilus and Cressida, I'll have read through the complete works in a little while.

Timon of Athens, which I'd never read, turned out to be something like a hybrid of "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out" and the Book of Job, and Titus Andronicus (I can't imagine anyone else reading that play unless it was assigned in a course) is as violent and gruesome as some of the movies and TV series I've been avoiding.
Clearly some of Shakespeare's works are of literary interest today only because they were written by the genius who wrote Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream. But even in the sub-standard plays there are passages of breathtaking beauty, of course.
Of course?
You try writing a passage of breathtaking beauty like John of Gaunt's praise of England from Richard II, not one of Shakespeare's greatest plays:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear'd by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry, Of the world's ransom, blessed Mary's Son, This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, Like to a tenement or pelting farm: England, bound in with the triumphant sea Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds: That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

The project of reading all of Shakespeare offered me a fine demonstration of my ignorance (about British history, for example, and of Elizabethan English) and has left me with a lot of questions, whose answers I might pursue, if I'm not too lazy.
One of these questions involves the connection between dramatic convention and real life. One of the main drivers of plot in Shakespeare's plays is the conceit of love at first sight.
The moment Romeo lays eyes on Juliet, he forgets all other women. The moment Ferdinand spies Miranda (in The Tempest), he knows she's the woman for him. In Midsummer Night's Dream the lovers keep falling in and out of love with each other, on the spot, thanks to magic - perhaps a humorous comment about the dramatic convention.
I don't know the history of this convention. It certainly goes back as far as Jacob and Rachel in the Bible and remains powerful in contemporary fiction, drama, and film. So maybe there's something to it, and it's not just a literary convention.
In general, there is something to almost everything in these plays, meaning that, even though some of their concerns are local and time-bound, Shakespeare manages to present them in a way that enables us to identify with them, five hundred years after he wrote them. 
Perhaps I should be distinguishing between conventions like love at first sight, which he uses to push the action forward - insults to honor, intrigue and manipulation, deceit - and universal human concerns. 
Take Cymbeline, which involves a bet on a woman's chastity, rather offensive to twenty-first century readers. Still, if the spam messages I keep getting, advertisements for services to find out whether my spouse is cheating on me are indicative of anything, the issue of trust in relationships is perennial. 
Needless to say, the themes of ambition, revenge, honor, trust are not peculiar to English society at the end of the sixteenth century. Conventions change, but people have always been people, so I assume (and hope) we'll keep reading and staging Shakespeare.