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"Henry V" (at the Delacorte Theatre, in Central Park, under the lively if uneven direction of Mark Wing-Davey) is Shakespeare's version of three-card monte: what you see is never what you get. What seems, on the surface, a panegyric to the victor of the battle of Agincourt is, in the ironies of its structure and the antitheses of its speech, a cunning commentary on the hypocrisy of political personality.
The prodigal Prince Hal, having ascended the throne, has been born again. "The courses of his youth promised it not," the Archbishop of Canterbury explains in the first scene:
The breath no sooner left his father's body, But that his wildness, mortified ...