Joshua Marshall defends Rumsfeld.

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Or possibly President George W Bush. No, I’m being quite serious.

Marshall turned an entire passage from Henry V into a post today:

KING HENRY. I dare say you love him not so ill to wish him here alone, howsoever you speak this, to feel other men’s minds; methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as in the King’s company, his cause being just and his quarrel honourable.

MICHAEL WILLIAMS. That’s more than we know.

JOHN BATES. Ay, or more than we should seek after; for we know enough if we know we are the King’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the King wipes the crime of it out of us.

MICHAEL WILLIAMS. But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all ‘We died at such a place’- some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it; who to disobey were against all proportion of subjection.

…and I think that it’s fair to say that he wasn’t doing it just for the aesthetics of it all. It’s also fair to say, I think, that Marshall’s intention was to transform the question made by Williams into a larger context; given that the news of the day involved SecDef Rumsfeld and the recent barbarities committed in Iraq, I will go out on a limb and suggest that Marshall’s intent was to cast either Rumsfeld or Bush in the part of Henry.

That’s… interesting, given Henry’s response:

KING HENRY V
So, if a son that is by his father sent about
merchandise do sinfully miscarry upon the sea, the
imputation of his wickedness by your rule, should be
imposed upon his father that sent him: or if a
servant, under his master’s command transporting a
sum of money, be assailed by robbers and die in
many irreconciled iniquities, you may call the
business of the master the author of the servant’s
damnation: but this is not so: the king is not
bound to answer the particular endings of his
soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of
his servant; for they purpose not their death, when
they purpose their services. Besides, there is no
king, be his cause never so spotless, if it come to
the arbitrement of swords, can try it out with all
unspotted soldiers: some peradventure have on them
the guilt of premeditated and contrived murder;
some, of beguiling virgins with the broken seals of
perjury; some, making the wars their bulwark, that
have before gored the gentle bosom of peace with
pillage and robbery. Now, if these men have
defeated the law and outrun native punishment,
though they can outstrip men, they have no wings to
fly from God: war is his beadle, war is vengeance;
so that here men are punished for before-breach of
the king’s laws in now the king’s quarrel: where
they feared the death, they have borne life away;
and where they would be safe, they perish: then if
they die unprovided, no more is the king guilty of
their damnation than he was before guilty of those
impieties for the which they are now visited. Every
subject’s duty is the king’s; but every subject’s
soul is his own. Therefore should every soldier in
the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every
mote out of his conscience: and dying so, death
is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was
blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained:
and in him that escapes, it were not sin to think
that, making God so free an offer, He let him
outlive that day to see His greatness and to teach
others how they should prepare.

WILLIAMS
‘Tis certain, every man that dies ill, the ill upon
his own head, the king is not to answer it.

I can only assume that Marshall is in agreement, both in the play and in the analogy that he’s drawing: he picked this passage, after all, and surely he would not have cast Rumsfeld or Bush in the role unless he was comfortable with them taking on all the aspects of the character, rather than just the convenient ones. For that matter, anyone familar with the play would have known the text; we can therefore assume that Marshall is aware of the next passage and has no issue with it, for otherwise would he have not explicitly ended the comparison in his post? Of course he would have; it would be insulting of me to even imply that everything Joshua Marshall knows of Henry V* comes from Star Trek, or that he has a sufficiently low opinion of his readership that he’d just assume that nobody would be aware of the text, so I won’t do any such thing. I’ll simply applaud his fairminded defense of either Rumsfeld and/or Bush, and regret that he could not bring himself to say so explicitly.

Or perhaps I’m being unreasonable; Marshall may simply have been rushed for time. We’ll no doubt see a correction any moment now.

Moe

(Via Double plus Ungood; btw, I swear that none of that was directed at you, dude.)

*Never fails: complain about somebody’s scholarship and you’re certain to make your own errors. Fixed.

22 thoughts on “Joshua Marshall defends Rumsfeld.”

  2. Rather unbecomingly snide post in my opinion. I never found praeteritio endearing in Cicero and I still don’t, especially here, where I suspect you don’t know the play and the history in question well enough to be snarking.

  3. Pretty funny, yes, Marshall seems to have messed up. He quoted that same passage a few days ago, about the “unjust cause”. Shakespeare is tough for me, and I read him slowly, so will go thru it again. I am sure your Bard knowledge higher than mine, but still want to parse carefully. I wondered the first time Marshall quoted “unjust cause”, for I was sure that Henry demonstrated the justness of his cause, in argument and proven later by the event.

  4. Nope. The question at hand and answered by Henry concerns pre-battle sins, not those committed in the service of the king and heat of battle. The discussion parses the difference.

  5. I wrote a paper on that section college, so I knew right away that he was leaving something out…
    Henry seems to clearly “win” the argument in the play, and does not resort to his status as the King to do so, but damn, I find Michael Williams’ lines a lot more memorable and convincing. But then, I would. And I should probably refrain from imputing that to Shakespeare.

  6. Incidentally, great link, Moe.
    I could a tale unfold whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood…
    Geez, someone should hire this Billy guy as a screenwriter.

  7. ” where I suspect you don’t know the play and the history in question well enough to be snarking.”
    Actually, I was a English Lit major for my undergraduate degree; I (and eight other people) spent an entire semester taking apart Shakespeare’s history plays and putting them back together again, all under the gimlet eye of a card-carrying member of the Richard III Society.
    And I wasn’t the one who tried to do a drive-by on the Bard in the first place, so feel free to direct your objections re snideness to Marshall.
    Moe

  8. “Geez, someone should hire this Billy guy as a screenwriter”
    There was a HBO movie once (can’t remember the title; was a sequel to Cast a Deadly Spell, an alternate history 1940s setting where everybody could use magic) where some Hollywood executives did exactly that (either necromancy or a temporal spell). By the end of the flick he was dressed in Bermuda shorts and sporting sunglasses…

  9. Moe, sounds like you have excellent bona fides – guess I’m just going to be baffled by this post. As far as I can tell, Marshall referred to a famous example of a long-running debate in our cultural heritage without making any comment, and you’re replying with mind-reading.
    Mostly OT: Man did I think _Shakespeare in Love_ bit.

  10. “be assailed by robbers and die in many irreconciled iniquities”
    Henry is trickily changing the rhetorical subject right here, from innocent subject to wicked subject. No, actually Henry subtly shifts it in the first sentence. Henry a pretty tricky guy here, huh.
    As someone who merely visited Shakespeare rather than lived in him, the Rose Histories are my favorites. I view them as one long tragedy, from Richard to Richard, from usurpation to restoration. And Henry V, in some weird ironic way, the most tragic figure of them all. Am I all wet? it is in appearance a very positive play.

  11. Actually, I was a English Lit major for my undergraduate degree; I (and eight other people) spent an entire semester taking apart Shakespeare’s history plays and putting them back together again, all under the gimlet eye of a card-carrying member of the Richard III Society.
    Oh, yeah?
    Well I am Shakespeare.

  12. “As far as I can tell, Marshall referred to a famous example of a long-running debate in our cultural heritage without making any comment, and you’re replying with mind-reading.”
    Yes, I did. Then again, we were expected to deduce Marshall’s unstated meaning to begin with (unless somebody wants to seriously argue that he just felt like posting random bits from Shakespeare)…

  14. “And Henry V, in some weird ironic way, the most tragic figure of them all. Am I all wet?”
    To be honest, I’m a bit ambivalent towards Henry V. Even as Prince Hal he was… I want to say detached, but that doesn’t quite work. It’s harder to connect with that character than it is most of Shakespeare’s; he sometimes lacks – whatever it is that makes the Bard’s characters so personally memorable. We remember the Shakespearean Henry V for what he says, not what he is.
    Or something. I’m approaching the point where I may have to dive back into the plays for a weekend.

  15. “Then again, we were expected to deduce Marshall’s unstated meaning to begin with…”
    I prithee, consider my comment where I assert we weren’t, necessarily. Anyway, you guess reasonably above, then go off on a tangent about what you think Shakespeare thought (in my view a bizarre thing to claim) as if it were relevant. But as it’s Annoyed Moe Friday I’ll shut up.

  16. Please tell me that you saved your notebooks.
    Indeed I have.
    By the way, I just want to clear up this business about whether someone like me could have such a breadth of historical, cultural, and geographic understanding.
    Well, there’s a simple reason for that.
    I was from the future.

  18. To be honest, I’m a bit ambivalent towards Henry V
    The character, presumably – the guy was only around 28 at Agincourt and facing a much larger foe. Mind you, the scene above is where Henry is at his loneliest; that’s saying something pretty tragic about being a king.
    Prince Hal is often difficult to glimpse beside the glare of Falstaff, but it’s doable.

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