Hold the Social Contract, Keep a Shred of Humanity?

Have you ever heard of a social contract? Simply put, a social contract is an agreement among people who live together in a society (that’s what makes it a social contract). Social contracts usually involve people giving up a little bit of the great freedom, power, and independence they would have in nature in order to be safer, more fruitful, more productive, and more efficient. For instance, a king’s subjects can’t just do whatever they want—they must obey the king’s laws—but the king works to keep his subjects safe.

At least, that’s how it ought to be. Several testimonies on Macbeth’s leadership in Act V, Scene 2 reveal Macbeth’s failure to care for his subjects as a good king should:
• Menteith refers to him as “the tyrant” (V.2.13).
• “Those he commands move only in command, / Nothing in love: Now does he feel his title / Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe / Upon a dwarfish thief” (V.2.22-25). –Angus
• “Well, march we on, / To give obedience where ‘tis truly owed” (V.2.30-31). –Caithness

In other words, Macbeth, like any leader, ought to be obeyed due to his position of leadership; a good leader, however, would have earned that obedience by loving and caring for his subjects. Instead, Macbeth treats everyone poorly and in some cases is needlessly cruel. (Give me one good reason for Macbeth’s verbal abuse of the servant in lines 11-22 of Scene 3!) He is suspicious of everyone, paranoid that any of them could harm him as he has harmed so many others.

You could say that he is only looking out for his own interests, but that is not true either. He is looking out for himself, yes, but he is also looking out for his queen. He pesters the doctor in Scene 3 as any ordinary spouse might (except, of course, the addition of veiled threats). Such a scene makes me wonder what it was like when Lady Macbeth birthed that child to whom she has “given suck” . . .

Nervous new dad Macbeth. If you can picture it, that might be as disturbing as anything actually in the play.

Upon Lady Macbeth’s death, Macbeth is distraught. His famous lines (V.5.20-31) are mournful and human. Macbeth’s love of Lady Macbeth is the only sign of humanity in him. The very person who, in the first act of the play, wished for inhumane cruelty for herself and her husband is now the indicator that he has any humanity left in him. And yet Macbeth has committed murder several times over. He has become a monster and a tyrant, but he is still like a human in a few small ways. If he is capable of these things, could you be as well? Could I?

And that just might be the most terrifying thing of all.

I pledge that I have neither given nor received any unauthorized aid on this assignment.