About the Play:

William Shakespeare's tragic masterpiece King Lear tells the story of a monarch as blind to his children's true natures as he is to his subjects' needs. He divides his kingdom between his two elder daughters – only to be discarded to a world verging on chaos. Battling the elements from within and without, Lear journeys to the brink of madness. Tender, brutal, moving and epic, King Lear is considered by many to be the greatest tragedy ever written.

Read William Shakespeare's great tragedy King Lear in all its brilliance and actually understand what it means. No Fear Shakespeare gives you Shakespeare's complete text of King Lear on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand modern English on the right.

Shakespeare side-by-side in plain English. Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:
• The complete text of the original play
• A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into the kind of English people actually speak today
• A complete list of characters with descriptions
• Plenty of helpful commentary

About the Playwright:

Arguably the greatest English-language playwright, William Shakespeare was a seventeenth-century writer and dramatist, and is known as the Bard of Avon. Under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I, he penned more than 30 plays, 154 sonnets, and numerous narrative poems and short verses. Equally accomplished in histories, tragedies, comedy, and romance, Shakespeare's most famous works include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, and As You Like It. Like many of his contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare began his career on the stage, eventually rising to become part-owner of Lord Chamberlain's Men, a popular dramatic company of his day, and of the storied Globe Theatre in London. Extremely popular in his lifetime, Shakespeare's works continue to resonate more than three hundred years after his death. His plays are performed more often than any other playwright's, have been translated into every major language in the world, and are studied widely by scholars and students.