ABSTRACT
From common thief to paragon of a Christian king: the fictionalized version of the historical King Henry V that moves through this play changes about as much as a character can. Or does he? Why, how, and whether the caddish Prince of Wales we meet when The Famous Victories of Henry V opens transforms into someone noble by the time it ends is a mystery that gives the play its prevailing tension. Audiences might accept that Henry has genuinely undergone some form of spiritual growth, akin perhaps to the “Everyman” figures in the morality plays of the medieval and Tudor English theater tradition. But the play also raises an uncomfortable question. Is the man who has conquered France on the battlefield and then successfully wooed the French princess in the play’s closing moments truly worthy of admiration? Or is he still the wily manipulator and street brawler he was at the start, only now on a bigger scale and with loftier rhetoric?
