believed that witches were real and constantly trying to sabotage humans at the time. In ‘Macbeth’, when characters do an action considered evil, unnatural coincidences happen in return. For example, when Macbeth kills Duncan, Ross and an old man converse about unnatural, strange things happening, which seem to coincide with what Macbeth did. The old man says about the atmosphere following the murder, ’Tis unnatural,/Even like the deed that’s done’. He also refers to the skies storming, as the “dark night strangles the travelling lamp,” as well as an owl killing a falcon that usually kills mice. The last one in this scene is Duncan’s horses acting wildly and eating each other. All of these occurrences are unnatural and opposite to what is normal, suggesting that the natural order has been inverted at the death of the king. This conflict starts from the beginning of the play with the Witches. Usually speaking in paradoxes, the Witches confuse the characters and even the audience into thinking that whatever is unnatural is natural and vice versa. Macbeth calls them ‘imperfect speakers’, referring to their paradoxical words. In the witches’ first appearance at the beginning of the play, the Witches close their meeting with the words, ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair,/Hover through the fog and filthy air’, this means that right is wrong and wrong is right, right being natural and wrong being unnatural. Everything natural is good and everything evil and bad is associated with being unnatural. Also, when Banquo meets the Witches, he implies that they are unnatural by saying, ‘What are these,/So withered, and so wild in their attire,/That look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth/And yet are on ’t?’. The conflict between the natural and unnatural world is very important in Macbeth, as in the Jacobean times, which is when the play would have been shown for the first time, they believed in all of the supernatural and the play plays out to exactly what they would have imagined happening if someone killed the king.

Marital conflict is also an important theme of conflict in ‘Macbeth’. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are first seen together after Macbeth has received a prophecy from the witches claiming that he will become King of Scotland. Their mutual ambition to fulfil the witches’ prophecy is the thing they have in common the most in their relationship. However, while Macbeth is happy to wait for fate to take its course, Lady Macbeth has a clear goal to usurp t