Lady Macbeth persuades her husband to prove his courage through murder. Hamlet struggles to distinguish decisive action from reckless impulse, while Benedick risks his closest friendships to defend an innocent woman. Across three plays, Shakespeare asks what makes courage worthy of admiration.

By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

Macbeth enters the play as a brave man. Before we meet him, a wounded Captain has described how he cut his way through the rebel army, calling him “brave Macbeth” and “Valor’s minion” (Macbeth, 1.2). Duncan names him a “valiant cousin” and “worthy gentleman.” He has demonstrated his courage in battle, where the danger is immediate, and his duty is clear. Yet the first thing that actually frightens Macbeth onstage is a thought. When the witches tell him he will be king, he asks why he yields to a “suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair / And make my seated heart knock at my ribs” (1.3). The soldier who has faced an army is physically shaken by something that happens entirely in his imagination.

Shakespeare repeatedly examines the distance between the capacity to face danger and the moral judgment that gives such conduct its worth. Macbeth remains physically brave after becoming a murderer. Hamlet worries about cowardice even though he can act with disastrous speed. In Much Ado About Nothing, Benedick’s military courage belongs largely to the world preceding the play, while his most consequential decision requires him to risk the friendships and loyalties through which he understands himself. Courage takes its moral meaning from what a person is willing to risk and, more importantly, what or whom that risk serves.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle offers a useful distinction: the courageous person confronts what is frightening for the sake of what is noble. He distinguishes courage from conduct that resembles it, including the endurance of soldiers motivated by shame and the apparent bravery of experienced fighters whose knowledge makes danger less frightening (3.7–3.8). Shakespeare gives these distinctions dramatic life by placing characters in circumstances where boldness may serve an unworthy purpose, while a refusal to act may require considerable courage.

Courage Turned into Proof: Macbeth

By the seventh scene of the first act, Macbeth has thought carefully about Duncan’s murder and decided against it. His reasons are good ones. Duncan is his king, his kinsman, and his guest, and Macbeth understands the obligation of hospitality: “Who should against his murderer shut the door, / Not bear the knife myself” (1.7). He imagines Duncan’s virtues pleading against the crime and admits that he has “no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition.” When Lady Macbeth enters, he tells her, “We will proceed no further in this business.”

He isn’t being timid. He has looked directly at something he wants and judged the desire insufficient to justify the act. His next line states the principle more plainly: “I dare do all that may become a man; / Who dares do more is none” (1.7). Macbeth has placed a moral boundary around daring. Some actions diminish a man rather than proving him, however much nerve they require.

Lady Macbeth attacks the boundary by attacking the man who drew it. “Art thou afeard / To be the same in thine own act and valor / As thou art in desire?” she asks, then tells him that allowing “I dare not” to wait upon “I would” will leave him living “a coward” in his own esteem (1.7). She is using the Captain’s word. Macbeth entered the play through somebody else’s praise of exactly that quality.

Janet Adelman’s chapter “Escaping the Matrix: The Construction of Masculinity in Macbeth and Coriolanus” places the play’s treatment of masculinity within her larger argument about male identity and maternal power (130–64). Adelman explains why the attack on his manhood lands so hard. I’m after something narrower. Lady Macbeth turns courage from an ethical capacity into evidence of identity. Macbeth’s question had been whether murder was an act a man should dare. She replaces it with another question: what does his refusal reveal about the kind of man he is?

“When you durst do it, then you were a man,” she tells him, “And, to be more than what you were, you would / Be so much more the man” (1.7). The murder becomes a test. By the time she tells him to “screw your courage to the sticking place,” courage has become almost mechanical, something he can tighten enough to perform whatever task he has already chosen.

Macbeth accepts the new terms. “I am settled,” he says, “and bend up / Each corporal agent to this terrible feat” (1.7). Yet the murder itself does not settle anything. Immediately afterward, he stands outside the chamber, still holding the daggers, and refuses to take them back: “I am afraid to think what I have done; / Look on ’t again I dare not” (2.2). He says dare again. Macbeth had insisted he could “dare” everything proper to a man; now, having committed the act Lady Macbeth said would prove him one, he cannot look at the proof it required.

The question returns at the banquet. When Banquo’s ghost appears, Lady Macbeth again asks, “Are you a man?” Macbeth answers, “Ay, and a bold one, that dare look on that / Which might appall the devil” (3.4). When the ghost returns, Macbeth insists, “What man dare, I dare,” and imagines physical dangers he could confront without trembling: a bear, a rhinoceros, a tiger. Those creatures belong to a world Macbeth understands. Banquo’s ghost does not. At a table full of guests, he shouts at a seat only he can see filled, and the argument still depends on proving that fear cannot define him.

His last scenes preserve enough of the soldier we met at the beginning to keep the problem alive. Macbeth has “almost forgot the taste of fears” because he has “supped full with horrors” (5.5), but when Malcolm’s forces reach him, he keeps fighting even as the witches’ assurances begin to collapse. Face to face with Macduff, he briefly refuses to kill him: “My soul is too much charged / With blood of thine already” (5.8). When Macduff reveals that he was “from his mother’s womb / Untimely ripped,” Macbeth says, “I’ll not fight with thee.”

Macduff answers, “Then yield thee, coward,” and threatens to make Macbeth a public spectacle. Macbeth cannot accept that ending. He will not “kiss the ground before young Malcolm’s feet / And to be baited with the rabble’s curse,” so he takes up the fight and dies (5.8).

I find it difficult to dismiss the bravery of that final action simply because Macbeth has become a tyrant. Shakespeare has not made him physically cowardly in order to make him morally ruined. The courage is still there. What has altered is its object. Macbeth once spent his courage in service to Duncan and Scotland; by the end, he spends it partly to protect his image from the humiliation of surrender. Death is easier for him to face than the possibility of living as the coward another man has named him.

Readiness Without Certainty: Hamlet

Hamlet also understands courage through the possibility of shame. After watching the First Player summon tears over Hecuba, he turns on himself: “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” (2.2). An actor has produced genuine physical emotion for a woman who exists only in a story, while Hamlet possesses “the motive and the cue for passion” in the murder of his own father and still has not carried out the Ghost’s demand. “Am I a coward?” he asks, imagining the insults another man might inflict upon him. He calls himself “pigeon-livered,” yet he ends the speech with a plan to test Claudius through a performance. Hamlet may despise his need for evidence, but he remains unwilling to kill a king on a ghost’s word without determining whether the accusation is true.

In Gertrude’s chamber, Shakespeare gives him the immediate action he has accused himself of lacking. A movement behind the arras provokes Hamlet to draw his sword: “How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!” (3.4). The action is decisive and disastrously uninformed. Gertrude calls it “a rash and bloody deed,” and Hamlet discovers that he has killed Polonius. “I took thee for thy better,” he tells the dead man. His swiftness depends on mistaking an assumption for knowledge.

Yet the temptation to mistake boldness for worth remains. When Hamlet sees Fortinbras’s army marching toward Poland, he learns the soldiers are prepared to fight over land with “no profit but the name” (4.4). He recognizes the poverty of the cause, describing men marching “to their graves like beds” for “a fantasy and trick of fame.” Still, their willingness to act becomes another accusation against his delay. He concludes that greatness may require finding “quarrel in a straw / When honor’s at the stake,” and resolves that his thoughts will be “bloody or be nothing worth.” The speech is troubling precisely because Hamlet understands the emptiness of the military objective and nevertheless envies the determination with which it is pursued.

By the final act, his relationship to uncertainty has changed. Recounting his escape from the plot against his life, Hamlet tells Horatio that he acted “rashly,” adding, “praised be rashness for it,” because “our indiscretion sometime serves us well / When our deep plots do pall” (5.2). He has survived through a combination of intelligence, improvisation, and circumstances he could not have anticipated. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,” he observes, “Rough-hew them how we will.” His experience complicates the belief that sufficient deliberation can control what follows.

The fencing match tests this understanding. Hamlet admits to Horatio, “Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart” (5.2). Horatio offers to postpone the match, recognizing that his friend’s apprehension may be justified. Hamlet declines. “We defy augury,” he says, before concluding, “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”

I would hesitate to call this serenity. Hamlet feels the danger and proceeds, even though his unease may be justified. Earlier, the apparent decisiveness of other men had made him ashamed of his own hesitation. Here, his decision emerges from an acknowledgment that thought cannot eliminate uncertainty. Once the catastrophe begins, he turns his remaining actions toward others. He prevents Horatio from drinking the poisoned wine, asking him instead to live and tell his story, and gives Fortinbras his “dying voice” for the succession. With little power left, Hamlet focuses on the truth that will survive him and the future of Denmark.

The Cost of Taking a Side: Much Ado About Nothing

The men of Much Ado About Nothing come from a military world, but the play doesn’t need to prove their physical courage onstage. Claudio has distinguished himself in battle, while the Messenger says Benedick has also “done good service.” Beatrice immediately punctures the military praise by calling him “a very valiant trencherman” (1.1). She cares more about his appetite than his valor.

After Claudio humiliates Hero at the altar, Benedick remains in the church. After the others leave and he and Beatrice finally confess their love, Benedick makes what sounds like the safest possible romantic offer: “Come, bid me do anything for thee” (4.1).

“Kill Claudio.”

“Ha! Not for the wide world.”

Look at the order. Beatrice has not yet delivered the great speech about manhood and valor. She asks first, and Benedick refuses. “You kill me to deny it. Farewell,” she says, and begins to leave. Benedick stops her with “Tarry, sweet Beatrice,” but she insists that there is “no love” in him and asks him to let her go. He tries to answer; she says she will leave. Only then does he say, “We’ll be friends first,” and Beatrice answers, “You dare easier be friends with me than fight with mine enemy” (4.1).

From there her anger gathers force. Claudio has “slandered, scorned, dishonored” Hero, and Beatrice cries, “O, that I were a man!” Benedick tries several times to enter the conversation, but she keeps going until the argument reaches “manhood is melted into curtsies, valor into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue” (4.1). The complaint is especially sharp in an essay about courage because valor has become verbal. The men of the play know the language of honor, but their honor has not protected Hero from public destruction. Beatrice cannot challenge Claudio herself within the social arrangements the play gives her, and wishing cannot change that: “I cannot be a man with wishing; therefore I will die a woman with grieving.”

After Beatrice spends much of the exchange refusing to let Benedick divert her, he says, “Tarry, good Beatrice,” and asks the question that turns his decision: “Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?”

Beatrice answers, “Yea, as sure as I have a thought or a soul.”

“Enough, I am engaged. I will challenge him” (4.1).

Engaged is a good word for a play about promises. He is bound to a fight, and he is bound to her. Benedick has no independent proof of what happened at Hero’s window. He has seen Claudio’s conduct in the church; he knows Beatrice, and she has given him her certainty. He chooses to let that be enough.

He stands to lose a good deal. Claudio is his friend. Don Pedro is his prince. Male fellowship, wit, and military companionship shape the social world Benedick inhabits at the play’s start. To act for Hero and Beatrice means standing against that world before the truth of Hero’s innocence is publicly established.

The next act gives Shakespeare’s clearest statement of this essay’s argument. Don Pedro and Claudio joke about the near-fight with Leonato and Antonio, and Benedick answers, “In a false quarrel there is no true valor. I came to seek you both” (5.1). He responds directly to the quarrel they just described, though the line inevitably reaches further into a scene built on Claudio’s false accusation of Hero. This sentence could stand as an epigraph to the essay. Valor does not acquire moral worth merely because a man is willing to fight. The quarrel itself has to deserve him.

Claudio and Don Pedro continue to approach Benedick in their old language of wit, but he comes for something else. He asks to speak privately to Claudio and gives the challenge in full: “You are a villain. I jest not. I will make it good how you dare, with what you dare, and when you dare. Do me right, or I will protest your cowardice. You have killed a sweet lady, and her death shall fall heavy on you” (5.1).

Only afterward do Claudio and Don Pedro begin joking about the “feast.” Their refusal to take Benedick seriously adds to the scene’s pressure because wit has always been the language these men shared. Benedick no longer joins them there. Eventually he turns to Don Pedro and says, “My lord, for your many courtesies I thank you. I must discontinue your company” (5.1).

Lady Macbeth and Benedick both invoke cowardice, but the word serves very different purposes. Lady Macbeth uses it to make moral restraint look shameful. Benedick uses it to demand accountability from a man who publicly destroyed someone with far less power than himself. Courage cannot be located in the accusation alone. Its meaning comes from the thing the accusation is trying to make someone do.

Only after Benedick leaves does Don Pedro understand that the old register is gone: “He is in earnest.”

Playing the Resistance

An actor cannot play courage as a general quality because courage becomes visible only when something desirable lies on the other side of the choice. Meisner’s “pinch and the ouch” helps preserve the order of events: something happens before the response has any dramatic reason to appear (Meisner and Longwell 26–37). Hagen’s work on objective and obstacle approaches the same problem from another direction. The actor needs something specific to pursue, and the obstacle has to be experienced rather than merely understood intellectually (Hagen 174–83).

With Macbeth, I would begin from “Who dares do more is none.” The actor has to believe it. Macbeth has reached a conclusion about the moral limit of action before Lady Macbeth begins pressing him, and the scene becomes less interesting if he enters already waiting to be persuaded. Her “When you durst do it, then you were a man” must strike at an identity that matters to him, especially because the play introduced him through the language of valor before he ever spoke for himself.

The later “Look on ’t again I dare not” then has a history behind it. Macbeth has crossed the boundary he drew and done the thing he was told would establish his courage, yet his body refuses the aftermath almost immediately. I would not ask an actor to underline the repeated dare. I would want the earlier scene to remain alive enough that the word carries its own memory.

Hamlet creates almost the opposite rehearsal problem. “The readiness is all” is familiar enough to invite an actor into calm wisdom before the scene has earned either. I would begin with “how ill all’s here about my heart.” The unease is present first. Horatio hears it and offers a way out, giving Hamlet a real choice rather than a philosophical sentence to deliver.

That choice needs the Polonius scene somewhere behind it. “Dead for a ducat, dead” is decisive and disastrously fast. Hamlet has already shown he can act before thought catches up, and Fortinbras later shows that the temptation to equate boldness with worth is still very much alive. The final scene asks for something subtler. Hamlet knows he cannot know enough, still feels danger, and accepts the match anyway. If the actor plays “We defy augury” without apprehension, readiness becomes a motto. With the dread still in the body, it becomes an action.

Benedick presents another problem because the audience already knows which woman he loves and can anticipate his decision before he makes it. “Not for the wide world” therefore needs to be true when he says it. Claudio matters to him. Don Pedro matters to him. At the start of the conversation, Beatrice asks him to cross a line he has no intention of crossing.

What follows is especially useful for an actor because Benedick does not simply stand and listen while Beatrice persuades him. He keeps trying to enter the conversation: “Tarry, sweet Beatrice.” “We’ll be friends first.” “Hear me, Beatrice—.” “Nay, but Beatrice—.” “Beat—.” She keeps moving past him. He has to take the whole argument before he has an answer, and she won’t let him steer.

By the time Benedick asks whether she believes Claudio has wronged Hero, he has heard far more than the original command to kill him. Her answer—“as sure as I have a thought or a soul”—changes the exchange. She is no longer only furious. She has given him her certainty.

I would not ask the space before “Enough, I am engaged” to look brave. I would ask the actor to think about Claudio, and perhaps Don Pedro too, because those men have to remain valuable to him for the choice to cost anything.

The later “I must discontinue your company” carries that cost into the next scene. Benedick can believe he has chosen rightly and still feel what he is giving up. If leaving Don Pedro is easy, then the courage to do so is easy too.

Conclusion

Macbeth, Hamlet, and Benedick all can face danger, but Shakespeare places that capacity under the pressure of moral judgment. Macbeth’s bravery survives his descent into tyranny, increasingly directed toward defending an identity he cannot bear to surrender. Hamlet learns through his own disastrous haste that decisiveness offers no guarantee of wisdom, and his final readiness acknowledges the uncertainty that action cannot remove. Benedick faces a choice whose cost lies in the friendships and social loyalties he must be willing to sacrifice.

The difference becomes clearest in Benedick’s refusal to preserve the fellowship he once shared with Claudio and Don Pedro. He understands the value of their companionship, and challenging Claudio matters precisely because those relationships remain important to him. His declaration that “in a false quarrel there is no true valor” returns courage to the question of what deserves its exercise.

When Benedick finally leaves Don Pedro, he does so with courtesy. “For your many courtesies I thank you,” he says. “I must discontinue your company.” The language acknowledges the friendship even as he relinquishes it. Shakespeare keeps the cost of courage visible in the relationship Benedick chooses to leave.

Further Reading

Adelman, Janet. Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. Routledge, 1992. See “Escaping the Matrix: The Construction of Masculinity in Macbeth and Coriolanus,” 130–64.

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. Book 3.

Hagen, Uta, with Haskel Frankel. Respect for Acting. 2nd ed. Foreword by David Hyde Pierce. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.

Meisner, Sanford, and Dennis Longwell. Sanford Meisner on Acting. Vintage Books, 1987.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library.

Shakespeare, William. Much Ado About Nothing. Edited by Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles. Folger Shakespeare Library.