be seen to take different forms in different plays and always to emphasize both the blindness of the hero in not seeing what is happening to him beforehand and/or his inability to do anything other than what he does. There is no escape for the tragic hero from the calamity facing him, even when he knows full well what that calamity will be and even its source.
In Macbeth, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth challenge the natural order through regicide. From the first, the play makes use of the surrounding environment as a character in its own right, and the natural order is upset by the actions of Macbeth to the point where his downfall comes in a way that emphasizes that the world is turned upside down, a stage convention of the time indicating one way in which evil is manifested. The opening scenes in Macbeth set the stage with a sense of doom and foreboding as well as an overlay of the supernatural. In the f
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