Morning of the Battle of Agincourt, 25 October 1415, painted by Sir John Gilbert in the 19th century.
Practice Notes
Law and the Morality of War Today in Henry V
By Captain Anthony A. Contrada
Shakespeare’s Henry V
Henry V,the popular and enduring historical play composed by William Shakespeare centuries ago, portrays King Henry V’s campaign of 1415 to (re)take France for the English monarchy, culminating in the battle at Agincourt.1 Henry claimed France by the “law of nature and of nations.”2 The historical Henry V was one of England’s last “soldier kings” in the tradition of his predecessors, Edward III and the Black Prince, both of whom had campaigned successfully in France.
In popular culture and film, Henry V is often a patriotic affair, a Shakespearean precursor to today’s underdog sports films, with the climactic pre-battle “band of brothers” speech in the place of a coach’s pre-game pep-talk.3 That speech also lends its name to the Stephen Ambrose book4
and HBO series5 that have served as grist for many an Army officer professional development session. But beyond merely lending a famous title, Henry V itself can serve as a rewarding and provocative read for Army lawyers and others interested in the moral, legal, and political challenges inherent to any military action.
Government actors and legal scholars have long debated whether the United States’s presidency’s inherent executive power is a residuum of sovereign authority once held by British monarchs.6 Whether or not that is in fact the legal or historical basis of the U.S. President’s executive authority, in practice, foreign affairs and warfare have proven to be spheres of action in which a President (and senior military commanders) can most “[b]e like a king.”7 Henry V is relevant in the present day due to these analogous military and foreign affairs powers.
While America’s conflicts of the last two decades may—in some ways—have a distinctly modern character, there is no guarantee that future conflicts will be similar, even with carefully calibrated use of force and international media scrutiny of non-combatant deaths; thus, in a possible future of high-intensity conflicts and mass civilian deaths, the question “what is a judge advocate’s role” becomes thorny.8 One does not have to look far into America’s past to see times when the moral calculus of intentionally targeting civilian populations—Japan and Germany in World War II or Hanoi in the Vietnam War—appeared more in tune with Henry V’s threat to destroy a city if it remained “guilty in defense”9 than with a calibrated use of force to achieve a narrow military or counterinsurgency objective. Therefore, although Henry V deals with a late-medieval monarch’s military campaign, its significant themes remain uncomfortably close.
Conflicting Interpretations
Through the hagiographic speeches of the Chorus, the formal structure of the play frames Henry as a conquering hero. Henry is referred to as a paragon, “the mirror of all Christian kings,”10 but some commentators argue that Henry is an irredeemably ruthless battlefield commander and a Machiavellian ruler who masks his ruthlessness with a veneer of piety and justice.11 Throughout, readers and audiences have to grapple with the question of whether Henry—a soldier-statesman—is essentially a moral actor, a cynical political operator, or both at once.12
We see Henry’s approach on display as he justifies his decision to
invade France, makes operational judgments during the campaign itself,
dispenses military justice, and engages in moral bargaining with himself
and others. Henry shows that he understands his ultimate political and
military success may depend, in part, on his strategic control of his
jus ad bellum narrative.
Readers and audiences have to grapple with the question of whether Henry—a soldier-statesman—is essentially a moral actor, a cynical political operator, or both at once
Henry’s Jus ad Bellum13
The justness (or injustice) of Henry’s claim to France is a recurring theme. The play’s opening immediately casts doubt on the legitimacy of Henry’s war aims when the Archbishop of Canterbury privately suggests that he supports the English invasion of France because it would financially benefit the church. When the king enters moments later with his nobles, he asks for the Archbishop’s counsel on the justice of his dynastic claim to France:
My learnèd lord, we pray you to proceed
And justly and religiously unfold
Why the law Salic that they have in France
Or should or should not bar us in our claim . . . .
[T]ake heed how you impawn our person,
How you awake our sleeping sword of war.14
The Archbishop lays out a long-winded and somewhat inscrutable
legal-dynastic basis for Henry’s claim to France. Wanting a more concise
answer, Henry follows up with the question, “May I with right and
conscience make this claim?”15 Given the Archbishop’s revealed economic interest, neither the audience nor Henry is likely surprised by his affirmative answer. The Archbishop goes so far as to accept all blame if his counsel is wrong: “The sin upon my head, dread sovereign . . . .”16
The nature of Henry’s appeal to the Archbishop is especially noteworthy―the king is asking for the medieval equivalent of professional expert advice on a jus ad bellum question, while also benefitting from the church’s moral authority. While modern-day advisors to the President and commanders do not explicitly offer to take the sin of a given action upon themselves, a similar dynamic can exist today when subordinate military or legal advisors’ approvals may be central in portraying the legality or appropriateness of a particular decision. A few high-profile national security examples from the past two decades include United States Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memos and senior military officials’ statements regarding enhanced interrogation techniques17 and the targeted killings of Anwar Aulaqi18 and Qasem Soleimani.19 This is not in any way to suggest that such statements or opinions are cynical or self-serving, as the Archbishop’s appears to be in Henry V; rather, decision-making in the national security realm entails a complex interplay between the commander-in-chief, senior commanders, and their subordinate experts in determining the legal and moral proprieties of a given action; and, still today, the reality of moral responsibility for senior decision-makers is not as simple as a unitary “buck-stops-here” model. Perhaps this play highlights that the nature of these unequal dialogues20 may be less modern or bureaucratic than one might assume.
A final comparison on these lines: Henry’s reliance on the Archbishop to “sell” the justice of his war—even if the underlying basis was dubious—and his public acknowledgment of the Archbishop for his counsel, is reminiscent of President Lyndon Johnson’s public acknowledgment of his senior civilian and military advisors minutes before announcing an escalation in Vietnam—advisors who, in the words of one scholar, “made possible [Johnson’s] deceit and manipulation of Congress and the American people.”21
Immediately after his exchange with the Archbishop, Henry speaks with the French ambassador. Henry takes this opportunity to place the responsibility of his imminent invasion on the French prince who sent Henry an insulting “treasure” chest full of tennis balls:
[T]his mock of his
Hath turned his balls to gun-stones, and his soul
Shall stand sore chargèd for the wasteful vengeance
That shall fly with them; for many thousand widows
Shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands,
Mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down;22
Much later in the play, on the eve of battle, Henry disguises himself as a common soldier and speaks with his men as they nervously await the dawn. We hear the thoughts of two soldiers. One questions the justice of the king’s cause, and another replies that the justice of the king’s cause is “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.”23
But the other soldier is not satisfied:
But if the cause be not good, the King
Himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all
those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a
battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry
all “We died at such a place,” . . . .24
Henry’s answer is eloquent, but non-responsive as to the justice of his cause.25 He changes the subject to his soldiers’ responsibility for their own eternal souls:
[I]f 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 . . . .
Besides, there is no king, be his cause
never so spotless . . .
can try it out with all unspotted soldiers. . . .
Every subject’s duty is
the King’s, but every subject’s soul is his own.26
Audiences familiar with the preceding play, Henry IV, Part 2, may have yet further doubts as to the legitimacy of Henry’s claim, or his own belief in his claim.27 Henry V’s father, the ailing Henry IV, had counseled his son to take a “wag the dog” approach to calming domestic politics: “Be it thy course to busy giddy minds/ With foreign quarrels . . . .”28 Further, in his soliloquy on the eve of battle, imploring God for his support, Henry displays doubts as to the legitimacy of his claim to the English throne, which casts doubt on any derivative claim to France.29
Henry’s Jus in Bello and Military Justice
Once on campaign, we see Henry use terrifying threats of mass slaughter against the French populace to achieve their surrender. During the siege of Harfleur, prior to ordering an assault on a breech in the town walls, Henry demands surrender by Harfleur’s governor and warns him that it is the town’s last chance to surrender peacefully:
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the fleshed soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand, shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh fair virgins and your flow’ring infants.
What is it then to me if impious war,
Arrayed in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do with his smirched complexion all fell feats
Enlinked to waste and desolation? . . .
Take pity of your town and of your people
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command,
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil, and villainy.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Desire the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters,
Your fathers taken by the silver beards
And their most reverend heads dashed to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds . . . .30
But, in the play, the overwhelmingly brutal threat is never carried out.31 The town surrenders immediately after the threat and Henry orders his army to “[u]se mercy to them all.”32 Henry’s own words implicitly recognize the wrongfulness of what
he is threatening—“murder, spoil, and villainy”—though he rhetorically shifts the
responsibility to Harfleur, his soldiers, and “impious war” itself.33
Because the town surrenders, the audience is left to wonder how horrible
of a slaughter Henry would have allowed—was he ready to let his soldiers
rape and kill everyone, or was it just a clever tactic to ensure swift
surrender and save lives?
Henry also shows his flair for the draconian in the swift military
justice he dispenses on Bardolph, a soldier in his army personally known
to Henry. Bardolph stole a “pax” (a metal tablet) from a church, and
Henry approves of his execution by hanging.34
He goes on to issue what amounts to a general order to his army:35
We would have all such offenders so cut
off; and we give express charge that in our marches
through the country there be nothing compelled
from the villages, nothing taken but paid for,
none of the French upbraided or abused in disdainful
language; for when lenity and cruelty play
for a kingdom, the gentler gamester is the soonest
winner.36
Through his depiction of Henry’s army, Shakespeare may have intended to portray the transition from medieval chivalry to a, more, modern army.37 For example, the English army was filled with commoner-foot soldiers who were distinct from the French army; the majority of them were mounted knights.38 Misconduct by knights in Henry’s time was dealt with in courts of chivalry, whereas a modern army of citizen-soldiers required martial justice.39 In Bardolph’s case, it was a subordinate commander—Henry’s uncle, the Duke of Exeter—that sentenced Bardolph to hang. When Bardolph’s friend asks a captain to intercede on Bardolph’s behalf and request clemency, he is denied. Henry learns of Bardolph’s sentence a few lines later and expresses his approval.40 In its entirety, the scene displays parallels with a convening authority executing a sentence, and the commander-in-chief deciding not to exercise his clemency powers.
Shakespeare presumably intended the irony of Bardolph’s hanging for a stolen pax, when Henry himself could be said to have stolen the pax (latin for “peace”) of an entire country.41 Henry’s “lenity” approach toward the French people, the threatened slaughter of Harfleur, and his order to kill the prisoners offer contrasting examples of Henry’s Machiavellian approach in finding a precise admixture of fear and kindness, or ruthlessness and mercy, to achieve his aims.42 The suggestion that Henry’s approach to either the invasion or the conduct of the war is Machiavellian is not to assume that his ultimate aims are wrongful; an effective Machiavellian approach could be consonant with the pursuit or achievement of England’s common good.43
Most controversial are Henry’s two orders during the battle of Agincourt to kill all of his army’s French prisoners.44
First, it is uncertain why the order is given twice, each order within a
different scene. One possibility is that Henry’s first order was just an
expression of anger in the heat of battle and the order was not actually
followed, while another is that the common soldiers taken prisoner were
killed while the nobles were initially spared for their ransom value,
but then were subsequently killed after the second order.45
Second, there is the moral and jus in bello problem regarding the mass slaughter of prisoners. Such an act may have been seen as wrongful in Henry’s time and, more likely, would have been seen as wrongful in Shakespeare’s time.46 Henry’s stated reason for the first order is that the French army was reforming to renew its attack, implying that his much smaller army could not both fight a renewed French attack and guard the prisoners at the same time. In other words, it was an expedient tactical decision.
The second order to kill the prisoners is couched in the language of revenge because the French had just raided the English baggage train and killed all the English boys that had been left there. One of Henry’s soldiers praises him upon hearing the second order, “[W]herefore the King, most worthily, hath caused/ every soldier to cut his prisoner’s throat. O, ‘tis a/ gallant king!”47 However, this dubious justification is undermined by the sequence of events―Henry only learns of the slaughter of the English boys after he gave his first order to kill the prisoners. Thus, his second order to kill the prisoners may be nothing more than an effort to provide himself with a post-hoc justification for their killing.48 These troubling scenes are often left out of stage and film productions of the play.49 Notably, the two leading film versions, Laurence Olivier’s (1944) and Kenneth Branagh’s (1989), omit Henry’s orders to kill the prisoners.
Finally, a secondary character—Fluellan—provides ongoing didactic commentary regarding the proper practice of war. One of Henry’s captains, Fluellan expresses disapproval of siege mining as “not according to the disciplines of the war”50
(presumably because it is unheroic or unchivalrous), and describes the
French killing of the English boys as “expressly against the law of
arms.”51
Henry V engages the audience with literary analogues for professional counsel, proto-civil-military relations, jus ad bellum and jus in bello controversies, and a snapshot of proto-modern military justice
Conclusion
Henry’s tendency to shift the responsibility of his actions onto others is readily apparent and is, arguably, a central aspect of his character.52 A non-exhaustive list of examples includes many of the scenes discussed above: his initial public reliance on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s assurance that his war aim is just; his blaming of the war on the French prince’s insult; his speech to Harfleur in which he disclaims the slaughter he is simultaneously threatening; his non-answer to his soldier about the justness of his cause; and his blame of the French army’s actions for his own order to kill the prisoners. While Henry continually tries to shift the responsibility for his decisions onto others, we hear in his soliloquy his recognition that the weight of war rests, ultimately, “[u]pon the king.”53
To the extent the claim of a parallel between a medieval king’s and American president’s executive powers fails, perhaps it is due to the play’s lack of an analogous institution to Congress. Or perhaps that lack makes the claimed parallel even more apt. If the English nobles in the play are the analogue to Congress, they appear to drive little or none of England’s war policy. Similarly, even today’s proponents of Congress’s constitutional war powers typically find themselves arguing that Congress must re-assert constitutional powers that it has ceded.54
Finally, apart from the executive power aspect,
Henry V engages the audience with literary analogues for professional counsel, proto-civil-military relations, jus ad bellum and jus in bello controversies, and a snapshot of proto-modern military justice.
Henry V portrays both the allure and terror of war in a way that is still compelling four centuries after its first performance and in a way that can be especially engaging for military lawyers. One scholar has concluded that the play’s ambivalence undercuts altogether the possibility of “just war” and instead suggests that all war is “damnable.”55 Nevertheless, Henry V is great fun. In the character of Henry V, Shakespeare created a “peerless charismatic” who draws the audience in; even if his actions are chilling, he somehow remains beguiling.56 TAL
CPT Contrada is an appellate attorney, Government Appellate Division, U.S. Army Legal Services Agency, Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
Notes
1. William Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry V (Barbara A. Mowat & Paul Werstine eds., Folger Shakespeare Library),
http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org (last visited Mar. 19, 2020)
[hereinafter Henry V]. All lines quoted are from this edition; a slash (/) indicates a line break within shorter quotations; ellipses have been added to indicate omitted intervening text.
2. Id. act 2, sc. 4, l. 87.
3. On the eve of the Battle of Agincourt, which fell on St. Crispin’s Day, Henry gives a morale-boosting speech to his men. Henry V, supra note 1, act 4, sc. 3 (“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers[.]”).
4. Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st
Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
(1992).
5. Band of Brothers (HBO television miniseries 2001).
6. Compare Saikrishna B. Prakash & Michael D. Ramsey, The Executive Power over Foreign Affairs, 111 Yale L.J. 231 (2001) (advancing the theory), with Julian Davis Mortensen, Article II Vests Executive Power, Not the Royal Prerogative, 119 Colum. L. Rev. 1169 (2019) (countering the theory).
7. Henry V, supra note 1, act 1 sc. 2, l. 286.
8. See generally Colonel Gail A. Curley & Lieutenant Colonel Paul E. Golden, Jr., Back to Basics, Army Law., Sept./Oct. 2018, at 23, 27; Geoffrey S. Corn & Rachel E. VanLandingham, CIVCAS Reporting, Responsible Command and Feasibility, Lawfare (Aug. 7, 2019, 9:57 AM), https://www.lawfareblog.com/civcas-reporting-responsible-command-and-feasibility (near-peer warfare presents different challenges to assessing civilian casualties).
9. Henry V, supra note 1, act 3, sc. 3, l. 43.
10. Id. act 2, Chorus, l. 6.
11. Norman Rabkin, Rabbits, Ducks, and Henry V, in Bloom’s Shakespeare Through the Ages: Henry V
194 (Harold Bloom & Albert Rolls eds., 2010). Rabkin’s thesis is
that the play portrays an unresolved duality between an exemplary
Christian king and a Machiavellian politician.
Id. A similar view is taken by Paul A. Cantor, “Christian Kings” and “English Mercuries”: Henry V and the Classical
Tradition of Manliness, in Educating the Prince: Essays in Honor of Harvey Mansfield 74
(Mark Blitz & William Kristol eds., 2000). Cantor has also described
Henry V’s approach as a Machiavellian solution to Christian kingship,
combining the appearance of a pious king with ruthless effectiveness.
Paul A. Cantor,
Shakespeare’s Henry V: From the Medieval to the Modern World, in Perspectives on Politics in Shakespeare
11 (John A. Murley & Sean D. Sutton eds., 2006) [hereinafter
Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Henry V].
12. Unless otherwise stated, this article focuses on Shakespeare’s
character Henry V, rather than the historical figure, and emphasizes the
more challenging or negative aspects of Henry’s character. While there
are several excellent film adaptations of the play, all have cut
significant scenes and tend to portray Henry in a simpler, more
straightforwardly positive light than does Shakespeare’s text. For a
critique of the leading modern film adaption, concluding that the
filmmaker (Kenneth Branagh) “resanctified” the violent royal English
hegemony that Shakespeare had sought to expose,
see Chris Fitter, A Tale of Two Branaghs: Henry V, Ideology, and the Mekong
Agincourt, in Shakespeare Left and Right 259, 275 (Ivo Kamps ed., 1991).
13. Jus ad bellum refers to the conditions under which States may resort to war or to the use of armed force in general.
14. Henry V, supra note 1, act 1, sc. 2, ll. 11-14, 24-25.
15. Id. act 1, sc. 2, l. 101.
16. Id. act 1, sc. 2, l. 102.
17. Memorandum from Off. of Legal Couns. to Counsel to the President Alberto R. Gonzales, subject: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation Under 18 U.S.C. §§ 2340-2340A (1 Aug. 2002).
18. Memorandum from Off. of Legal Couns. to the Att’y Gen., subject: Lethal Operation Against Shaykh Anwar Aulaqi (19 Feb. 2010).
19. E.g., Brakkton Booker & Philip Ewing, Trump, Pompeo, Esper Defend Killing of Soleimani; Iranians Vow
Revenge, NPR (Jan. 7, 2020, 4:55 PM), https://www.npr.org/2020/01/07/794173642/mike-pompeo-on-drone-strike-that-killed-irans-top-military-leader-we-got-it-righ.
20. Eliot A. Cohen, Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen, and Leadership
in Wartime
12 (2002) (describing modern “[c]ivil-military relations” as “a dialogue
of unequals”).
21. H.R.
McMaster, Dereliction of Duty 321 (1997).
22. Henry V, supra note 1, act 1, sc. 2, ll. 267, 293-99.
23. Id. act 4, sc. 1, ll. 134-37.
24. Id. act 4, sc. 1, ll. 138-42.
25. See Rabkin, supra note 12, at 206; Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Henry V, supra note 11, at 19.
26. Henry V, supra note 1, act 4, sc. 1, ll. 156-61, 164-66, 182-83.
27. William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 (Barbara A. Mowat & Paul Werstine eds., Folger Shakespeare Library), http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org (last visited Mar. 19, 2020).
28. Id. act 4, sc. 3, ll. 372-73.
29. See, e.g., John Sutherland & Cedric Watts, Henry V, War Criminal? & Other Shakespeare Puzzles
122 (2000).
30. Henry V, supra note 1, act 3, sc. 3, ll. 10-18, 28-40.
31. Theodor Meron, Henry’s Wars and Shakespeare’s Laws: Perspectives on the Law of War
in the Later Middle Ages
89-91 (1993). The historical Henry V massacred the inhabitants of Caen
following the siege of Caen in 1417.
Id. Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War IV: Cursed Kings
383 (2015). Such treatment of inhabitants of a besieged city was
consistent with the code of war at that time.
Id.; Meron, supra, at 102-104. By Shakespeare’s time (roughly two centuries after the
historical Henry V’s campaign) such treatment of noncombatants likely
would have been viewed more critically.
Id.
32. Henry V, supra note 1, act 3, sc. 3, l. 55.
33. Id. act 3, sc. 3, ll. 15, 32.
34. Id. act 3, sc. 6.
35. The historical Henry V issued “ordinances” to his army that included, among other things, specific prohibitions against looting churches. See Theodor Meron, Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth and the Law of War, 86 Am. J. Int’l L. 1, 23-24, 32 (1992).
36. Henry V, supra note 1, act 3, sc. 6, ll. 109-116.
37. See Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Henry V, supra note 11, at 21-22. See generally Paul A. Cantor, Against Chivalry, The Weekly Standard (April 22, 2016, 12:30 AM), https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/against-chivalry.
38. Paul A. Cantor, Against Chivalry, The Weekly Standard (April 22, 2016, 12:30 AM) https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/against-chivalry; Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Henry V, supra note 11, at 29, n.20.21-22.
39. Meron, supra note 31, at 152, 168
40. Henry V, supra note 1, act 3, sc. 6.
41. Graham Bradshaw, Misrepresentations: Shakespeare and the
Materialists
41 (1993); John S. Mebane,
“Impious War”: Religion and the Ideology of Warfare in “Henry
V”, 104 Stud. Philology 250, 259 (2007).
42. See Mebane, supra note 41, at 262; Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Henry V, supra note 11, at 21-22.
43. See, e.g., Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Henry V, supra note 11, at 26-27 (contrasting Shakespeare’s Henry V’s benign Machiavellianism with Shakespeare’s Richard III’s malignant Machiavellianism); see also Giovanni Giorgini, Machiavelli on Good and Evil: The Problem of Dirty Hands
Revisited, in Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict 61-62 (David Johnston et al. eds., 2017) (arguing Machiavelli’s amoral methods were for the purpose of instructing rulers how to protect the state and therefore achieve the common good). But cf. Harvey C. Mansfield, Machiavelli’s Virtue
102, 160 (1966) (not accepting that Machiavelli’s prince was primarily
concerned with the common good, though allowing that a Machiavellian
prince’s own good may be consonant with the common good, particularly
when it “is a good taken from foreigners”; a prince driven by the
“necessity of acquisition” will “incidentally” make possible the common
good).
44. Henry V, supra note 1, act 4.
45. E.g., Sutherland & Watts, supra note 29, at 115-16.
46. Meron, supra note 31, at 154-71. Henry V was not criticized in his own time for his decision, and one contemporary French source blamed the English killing of the French prisoners on the French army for continuing to threaten attack. Sumption, supra note 31, at 458.
47. Henry V, supra note 1, act 4, sc. 7, ll. 9-11.
48. Sutherland & Watts, supra note 29, at 112-13; Cantor’s Shakespeare’s Henry V, supra note 11, at 22.
49. See generally Mebane, supra note 41, at 256.
50. Henry V, supra note 1, act 3, sc. 2, l. 61.
51. Id. act 4, sc. 7, ll. 1-2.
52. Mebane, supra note 41, at 258; Sutherland & Watts, supra note 29, at 117.
53. Henry V, supra note 1, act 4, sc.1, l. 238.
54. See, e.g., Tim Kaine & Mike Lee, Why We’re Introducing a Resolution on War with Iran, Wash. Post (Jan. 14, 2020, 5:38 PM), https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/why-were-introducing-a-resolution-on-war-with-iran/2020/01/14/8a770aa4-36f5-11ea-bb7b-265f4554af6d_story.html; Oona A. Hathaway, The Soleimani Strike Defied the U.S. Constitution, The Atlantic (Jan. 4, 2020), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/soleimani-strike-law/604417/.
55. Mebane, supra note 41, at 252.
56. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human 323-24 (1998).