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a son in conflict with his father derives from stories that circulated in English popular culture before Shakespeare. These had previously been portrayed in the anonymous play The Famous Victories of Henry V, in which Hal's criminal and riotous behaviour is depicted as entirely unfeigned. In Shakespeare's plays Hal has soliloques in which he says that he is self-consciously adopting a wayward lifestyle to surprise and impress people by his later apparent character transformation:
:I know you all, and will awhile uphold
:The unyoked humour of your idleness:
:Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
:Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
:To smother up his beauty from the world,
:That, when he please again to be himself,
:Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at.

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