In this exercise you will have your students utilizing movement and physical gesture to bring to life one of the major speeches from the play.
- With an open space in the classroom cleared, students will stand in a circle and will need either a handout or their book with the Chorus’ first speech from the play.
- Each student will be responsible for reading approximately one line of the speech. In addition to reading their line aloud, they will also create some sort of movement/gesture to accompany the reading of that line. The movement/gesture can be performed as they read the sentence or can directly follow their recitation of the line.
- You will then move from student to student progressing clockwise in the circle as they each read their line of the speech.
- Once the students have read their portions at least one time with their accompanying movement/gesture, the pace can be increased by assigning one student as a narrator or narrating the speech yourself and having each student perform their movement/gesture in rapid succession so that all of the students can observe and remark upon their classmates choices on how to turn the words on the page to action.
Important for Students to Take Away from this Exercise:
- The first chorus of the play functions as a meta-theatrical moment in which an actor on Shakespeare’s stage directly addressed the live audience. The Chorus repeatedly apologizes for the insufficiency of the actors to present so great a subject with their humble stagecraft and thus ask for the help of the audience’s imagination. As in this school tour adaptation, Shakespeare’s plays were always performed with minimal costuming, props, and stagecraft, the audience was always acutely aware that they were watching a play. Realism was not the aim of theater at the time and instead what was the objective was to represent high subjects in abstraction with an audience willing and ready to fill in the imaginative gaps on their own. In general, this exercise is intended to prompt students to think about how theater works and how it relies upon both the imagination and the participation of an audience in bringing a show to life.
CHORUS:
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!
Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,
Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels,
Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire
Crouch for employment. But pardon, and gentles all,
The flat unraised spirits that have dared
On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth
So great an object: can this cockpit hold
The vasty fields of France? or may we cram
Within this wooden O the very casques
That did affright the air at Agincourt?
O, pardon! since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million;
And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,
On your imaginary forces work.
Suppose within the girdle of these walls
Are now confined two mighty monarchies,
Whose high upreared and abutting fronts
The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder:
Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts;
Into a thousand parts divide on man,
And make imaginary puissance;
Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i’ the receiving earth;
For ’tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,
Carry them here and there; jumping o’er times,
Turning the accomplishment of many years
Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,
Admit me Chorus to this history;
Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,
Gently to hear, kindly to judge, our play. (1.1.1-34)
Common Core Standards Fulfilled Through this Activity
English Language Arts Standards Reading: Literature
K – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL. K.1, K.2, K.4
1st – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL. 1.4
2nd – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL. 2.4
3rd – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL. 3.1, 3.4
4th – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL. 4.5
5th – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL. 5.1, 5.4
6th – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL. 6.1, 6.4
7th – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.7.1, 7.4, 7.7, 7.10
8th – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.8.1, 8.4, 8.7, 8.10
9th-10th – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.9-10.1, 9-10.4, 9-10.7, 9-10.10
11th-12th – CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.11-12.1, 11-12.4, 11-12.7, 11-12.10
Detailed Information on Common Core Standards can be found at: http://www.corestandards.org/read-the-standards/
OSU Henry V 