Margaret is Hero’s waiting-gentlewoman—a lady’s maid with wit sharp enough to hold her own in banter with anyone in Leonato’s household. She appears rarely but always leaves a mark. She trades jokes with Balthasar at the masked ball, teases Beatrice about her unmarried state, and makes clever observations about fashion and love. On the surface, Margaret is merely a witty, flirtatious attendant. Underneath, she becomes the unwitting centerpiece of Don John’s plot to destroy Hero. Borachio has won her favor, and through their relationship—particularly the staged seduction scene at Hero’s chamber window where Margaret wears her mistress’s clothes—he manufactures the “evidence” that convinces Claudio and Don Pedro of Hero’s infidelity. What makes Margaret’s role particularly poignant is that she genuinely does not understand what is happening. She believes she is simply flirting with a man who cares for her. She has no knowledge of Don John’s malice, no awareness that the scene being enacted at the window will be misread as proof of her mistress’s betrayal, and no concept of the catastrophic consequences that will follow.
The play treats Margaret with unusual mercy. When the truth emerges—that her actions, though innocent, nearly destroyed Hero—the text barely punishes her. Leonato acknowledges that “Margaret was in some fault for this, / Although against her will,” but the focus shifts quickly away from blame. This is partly because Margaret, unlike Borachio or Don John, acted out of genuine affection, not malice. She was seduced (literally and figuratively) into participation. Her wit and charm made her an easy target for Borachio’s manipulation. In the final scene, she appears among the reunited couples, still witty, still part of the household, her reputation intact. The play seems to suggest that innocence—or at least the absence of intent to harm—counts for something, even when one’s actions have caused irreparable damage.
Margaret’s small role illuminates a larger theme of the play: how easily language, appearance, and gesture can be weaponized. She speaks no ill of anyone; she simply exists at her window, speaking sweetly to a man she believed loved her. Yet that scene, reframed and misinterpreted, becomes a tool of slander. Margaret’s survival and redemption in the play’s final moments hint that the play understands the difference between malice and mistake—a distinction that saves her even as it takes longer to save Hero.
I pray you, is Signior Mountanto returned from the wars or no?
Please, has Signior Mountanto come back from the wars or not?
Margaret · Act 1, Scene 1
Beatrice opens the play by mocking Benedick with a false name, establishing her wit and her habit of deflecting emotion through scorn. The line sets the tone for their entire relationship—barbed exchanges that hide deeper feeling. Her immediate deflation of a man she will later love reveals how sharp-tongued resistance masks vulnerability.
O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place.
Oh, if only I were a man! I'd tear out his heart in the marketplace.
Margaret · Act 4, Scene 1
After Hero's public humiliation, Beatrice demands Benedick take action on her behalf, not because she lacks courage but because women lack the legal and social power to answer injury directly. Her fury at this limitation is the play's sharpest critique of gender—she does not wish to be a man in spirit, only in capacity to act. It is both the play's most passionate line and its most uncomfortable.
