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.

In Henry IV, Part 2, the Earl of Warwick suggests that Hal is fraternising with low-life characters to learn about human nature.

According to Thomas Elmham "He fervently followed the service of Venus as well as of Mars, as a young man might he burned with her torches, and other insolences accompanied the years of his untamed youth."

Tito Livio Frulovisi in Vita Henrici Quinti also says, "he exercised meanly the feats of Venus and Mars and other pastimes of youth for so long as the king his father lived.