1th Century Scotland was deemed a very much patriarchal society. There was a clear concept of hierarchy in society, which Shakespeare demonstrates at different points within the play. The witches have been said to represent women’s attempt to gain power in a society that’s set up to give power only to men. In Jacobean society, women would have been towards the bottom of the Chain of Being and certainly below men. Similarly to Lady Macbeth in act 1 scene 5, the Witches endeavour to make appear increasingly manly in an attempt to acquire more power. Shakespeare gives the characters of the witches beards (You should be women, yet your beards forbid me to interpret that you are so’) to symbolise this desire. Macbeth’s hallucinations, or visions present the impact of the supernatural. One example of a hallucination is when Macbeth asks, ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me’. The fact that Macbeth is seeing a floating dagger, in his mind is another demonstration of the supernatural. Here, the supernatural is essentially pressing Macbeth to murder Duncan. Shakespeare could be purposefully highlighting how evil the supernatural is as it is not only telling him to kill – but commit the act of regicide, which in the 11th Century, was possibly the worst crime anyone could commit, along with communicating with the supernatural. During Macbeth’s soliloquy he questions if the dagger is just ‘a dagger of the mind’ or a ‘false creation’. This causes Macbeth to question his own psychological state and whether the dagger is just a hallucination, caused the pressure of Duncan’s homicide and the pressure placed on him by his manipulative and cunning wife, Lady Macbeth. The audience at the time will have been shocked by this as Jacobean society saw king’s as almost holy since they respected the divine right of kings. Furthermore, here, Shakespeare is displaying the power that the supernatural has over events in the play since Macbeth has been driven to insanity by a supernatural prophecy.