I didn't sense a whole lot of contradiction the first time I read this through. The one thing that did jump out to me though was in scene three where the king tells them to prepare for battle but then right when the starting trumpet sounded, he threw down his "warder." Then they had to stop and listen to the king. From what he says later and from my interpretation of the play (which could be way off), we can see that this changing of the mind was rather purposeful and was to prove a point. I'm not sure about the rest of the characters, but I suspect from previous posts that they will turn out to be rather unhappy contradictions.
I hope that was along the lines of the assignment.