Lady Macbeth

This is how it was meant to be, at least in Shakespeare's time: Male actors played female characters, and female characters weren't particularly celebrated for their uber-femininity, but for their "characters," i.e. virtues or vices or an admixture of both.

Take for instance, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth's wife and chief-plotter of the plan for Macbeth to commit regicide and become the king of Scotland.

In the play Macbeth, Lady Macbeth does the masculine act of goading her husband to do the evil but necessary thing to fulfill his ambition of power. Macbeth initially shirks from the sacrilege of regicide as well as a violation of the code of hospitality, for the reigning king of Scotland, Duncan, happens to be a guest at Macbeth's castle the night he is murdered by his host.

Lady Macbeth calls her husband a "lily liv'rd man," as it was popularly believed in the Middle Ages that the seat of a man's courage is the liver. 

In the scene above, alan Cummings does a swell job of recreating the moment when Lady Macbeth, asks the heavens to fill her with the steely resolve to go through with the task of pushing Macbeth to murder the king.

I like the line, "come unsex me!"