SOURCE: Griffin, C. W. “Henry V's Decision: Interrogative Texts.” Literature/Film Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1997): 99-103.

In the following essay, Griffin analyzes three different film versions of Henry V and attempts to prove that “films can be just as plural, just as interrogative, as theatrical performances.”

In her book Critical Practice (1980), Catherine Belsey speaks of the “interrogative text,” that text which contradicts, even disrupts, itself. “The position of the ‘author’ inscribed in the text, if it can be located at all,” she says, “is seen as questioning or as literally contradictory” (91). Among other examples of interrogative texts, Belsey cites a number of Shakespeare's plays, including the Henry IV plays, Julius Caesar, The Winter's Tale, and Coriolanus. Coriolanus is interrogative, for example, because it dramatizes the “contradictory truth that heroic individualism is both necessary to and destructive of a militaristic society”; offering no single figure with a full grasp of the...