First of all, I loved the Spark Notes NO FEAR version which lets you read the modern English translation on the odd pages while the corresponding original text is on the even pages. My method was to read one full scene at a time in the modern text followed by the same scene in the original. It worked really well for me. I understood exactly what was going on all the time, which was far from true in my previous attempts at reading Shakespeare, and as a result the original text was rendered beautiful, poetic, and loaded with meaning.

Now for the story itself. It was great -- clever and intense and surprisingly brutal: the plucking out of poor old Gloucester's eyes really got to me. I've read and seen a little bit of Shakespeare before -- Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth, The Taming of the Shrew, and Twelfth Night -- but King Lear beats them all. The combination of the great story with NO FEAR version may have officially turned me into a true Shakespeare fan.