ok here georg, you should be focusing on the relvance of king lear today. ie - crap on about it's timelessness and universality which transcends the traditional barriers of time, race and religion.
then relate the scenes in say, queen lere. the first scene, how was it presented and emphasise that it was able to be represented in the way it is BEACAUSE SHAKESPEARE IS OUR CONTEMPORARY.
look, you could argue against the quote too, but i wouldn't advise it, considering that almost every frikkin shakespearean critic would agree with that statement rather than disagree.
useful people to refer to in your response would be Jan Kott and Maynard Mack.
Kott wrote a paper entitled Shakespeare our Contemporary (surprise surprise) where he argued that Shakespeare was incredibly modern. heres an extract about him from an essay i wrote on Lear:
"Jan Kott, the Polish critic who lived life under Stalin, lost his father to the Nazis and was Jewish in an occupied Nazi Poland, believes that there was a distinct parallel between Lears world and the modern world. In all the worlds tyranny, despair, cruelty and violence, he argues that Shakespeare was incredibly modern in his bleak view of humanity."
Maynard Mack wrote a book entitled "King Lear in Our Time" I'll admit, a copy of the book is right in front of me, but i'll be damned if i've read the thing. just quote Mack as someone else who argued that Shakespeare was our contemporary.
i hope i've been useful. I suppose you should just remember that in this module which is entitled "Critical Study of Texts" always bear in mind the concept of Lear in terms of it's critics -- ie, it's interpretations.
finally, the best crib for Lear is the Cambridge Student Guide, but there aren't any copies left in Australia at the moment, they are reprinting in the UK and copies should be available sometime around the end of May.
Good Luck!
