Course Content and Outcomes Guides (CCOG)

CCOG for ENG 201 Winter 2025


Course Number:
ENG 201
Course Title:
Shakespeare: Early Works
Credit Hours:
4
Lecture Hours:
40
Lecture/Lab Hours:
0
Lab Hours:
0

Course Description

Explores the development of Shakespeare's art and contribution to literature, culture, and the English language, with a focus on the earlier histories, tragedies, comedies, and non-dramatic poetry. Introduces the study of Shakespeare's dramatic techniques, character development, historical and cultural setting, and language. Recommended: ENG 105 and ENG 106. Audit available. Prerequisites: (WR 115 and RD 115) or IRW 115 or equivalent placement.

Intended Outcomes for the course

Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

  1. Identify qualities of Shakespeare’s earlier texts and the issues of interpretation and language confronted by readers, actors, and viewers when approaching his writing.
  2. Examine the development of Shakespeare’s art and contribution to literature and culture.
  3. Analyze texts to determine Shakespeare’s purpose, historical and cultural perspective, and use of rhetorical and dramatic strategies in creating a play and /or poem.
  4. Analyze how the philosophical and intellectual viewpoints of the English Renaissance shaped Shakespeare’s writing, and their application today.
  5. Identify and analyze the social and ethical questions the plays and poems raise regarding human experience.
  6. Analyze in writing the complex questions Shakespeare raises.

Integrative Learning

Students completing an associate degree at Portland Community College will be able to reflect on one’s work or competencies to make connections between course content and lived experience.

General education philosophy statement

English and Writing courses align with the PCC General Education philosophy by providing an appreciation of writing and literature from global and personal perspectives. Students in English courses engage the imagination, critical inquiry and self‐reflection, and in the process of doing so, cultivate a more complex understanding of their own culture(s), linguistic/communication practices, and perspectives in relation to others. Because the literary arts lie at the heart of most human cultures, they are essential for understanding each other and navigating our differences. In literature classes, students explore significant texts from diverse cultures and periods in history. Students look closely at texts from a range of genres, articulating the way elements of writing, content, form, and style are interrelated, and considering how values and interpretations have changed over time and through different theoretical lenses. Students engage texts through critical analysis and creative response, learning to use evidence to support their interpretations and to navigate critical conversations. Students explore literature both as an art form designed to provoke thought and challenge social norms, and as an expression of human experience. Writing and Literature courses foster a stronger sense of engagement with history, culture, and society. Writing and Literature students develop an awareness of themselves as readers and writers in a global world, and an enlarged understanding of the relationships between language, identity, ideas, scholarship, communication, and transformation.

Outcome Assessment Strategies


The instructor will assess students by employing a variety of the following methods:

  • regular in class writing
  • assigned essays
  • responses to study questions
  • responses to assigned reading of critical texts
  • group performance of soliloquies or scenes of selected plays ("blocking" exercises)
  • quizzes, tests, midterms + final exams
  • attendance at and responses to live performances and films

Course Content (Themes, Concepts, Issues and Skills)

Themes, concepts and issues may include:

  • Tragedy
     
  • Comedy
     
  • Romance
     
  • Problem Plays
     
  • Allegory
     
  • Satire
     
  • Morality play
     
  • Revenge tragedy
     
  • Tragicomedy
     
  • Myth
     
  • Tragic hero
     
  • Classical drama
     
  • Soliloquy
     
  • Setting
     
  • Scenes
     
  • Acts
     
  • Plot
     
  • Characters
     
  • Chorus
     
  • Prologue
     
  • Epilogue
     
  • Cross-dressing
     
  • Blank verse
     
  • Iambic pentameter
     
  • Heroic couplet
     
  • Irony
     
  • Metaphor
     
  • Renaissance literary and cultural history
     
  • The Shakespearean Sonnet form
     
  • Modern adaptations of Shakespeare's plays
     
  • History of performance of plays
     
  • Publishing history
     

Competencies and skills
The course will introduce and foster understanding of:

  • Analysis
     
  • Synthesis
     
  • Understanding Shakespeare's plays through various contexts, such as social, political, historical, artistic conventions and innovations;
     
  • Writing about drama
     
  • Visual "reading": critical interpretation of dramatic performance on video or in live theater
     
  • Critical reading (for instance, of reviews and critical essays)
     
  • Speaking and listening reflectively
     
  • Small-group collaboration