Designated Villain / Theatre

• This is done via Historical Villain Upgrade in 1776. For 90% of the play, John Dickinson appears to be a hidebound aristocrat whose primary concern about independence is that it will upset his comfortable, upper-class status quo, combined with a total aversion to risk and continued loyalty to England. It also attributes to Jefferson words actually written by Dickinson (the passage from On the Necessity For Taking Up Arms; the two men co-wrote it). It is remedied in the last scene, though, by giving Dickinson a Worthy Opponent sendoff where he proves that his desire for reconciliation really is the completely reasonable fear that the colonies will be crushed for rebelling and resigns from Congress to join the army.
• Cyrano de Bergerac: subverted by Colonel De Guiche In-Universe. The audience of the play identify him as the villain because he wants to bully Roxane into being The Mistress, but the Gascon Cadets who serve under him never call him out on this: they think he is the villain merely because he doesn't want to be an Idiot Hero, has villainous motivations, and prefers to thrive by his connections in the Decadent Court...and he dresses like The Dandy. In summation, De Guiche is the villain because he is No True Gascon. Observe that not one of the cadets even complain when De Guiche informs them of the Last Stand.
• Magnificent in Ibsen's A Doll's House with Nils Krogstad, who is repeatedly demonized as an unpleasant and weak dog kicker, but is, upon closer inspection, just trying to secure his job so he can feed his children, and is eventually talked into a total Heel–Face Turn. There is no real villain, apart perhaps from how Torvald and Nora have turned their marriage into a dysfunctional delusion where he doesn't take her seriously as a human being and she believes he'd keep supporting her even if she were to reveal her 'true' self.
• It happens in Fools. Count Yousekevitch is set up to be the villain by the other characters and is presented in a ridiculous "bad guy" outfit. His only real crime is trying to marry a pretty girl. Later, he even lampshades this. He then seemingly has a Pet the Dog moment... only to turn it into a Kick the Dog and prove himself to be just as bad as everyone else said.
• From the works of Gilbert and Sullivan:
  • Dick Deadeye in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore is roundly hated and vilified by all his shipmates, mainly for being ugly. "From such a face and form as mine the noblest sentiments sound like the black utterances of a depraved imagination." This certainly applies to the blandest sentiments, e.g., Dick: "Ah, it's a queer world!" Ralph: "Dick Deadeye, I have no desire to press hardly on you, but such a revolutionary sentiment is enough to make an honest sailor shudder." And when leading man Ralph, a foremast hand, in response to Sir Joseph's foolish claim that a British seaman is any man's equal (except his own), is deciding to propose to ingenue Josephine, his captain's daughter, Dick's voice of sanity—"When people have to obey other people's orders, equality's out of the question"—is roundly rejected by his messmates. On the other hand, when in Act II Dick has warned his captain of "the wicked men who['ll] art employ/to make his Josephine less coy", no retribution lands on Dick after the surprise ending that unites the hero and heroine after all. Perhaps everyone simply expects such behavior from "poor Dick Deadeye", the Designated Villain.
  • The Bad Baronets of Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore are obligated by a family curse to commit one evil deed each day, or else die in agony. The reigning Baronet, Sir Despard Murgatroyd, is a Punch-Clock Villain, who gets his daily crime over early in the day and does good afterwards. After the hero is unmasked as Despard's elder brother, Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd, he emerges from his Face–Heel Turn as a Harmless Villain, who commits misdemeanors so small that the ghosts of his ancestors rise up to torment him until he agrees to prove that he can do something more nefarious.
• Hamilton: Aaron Burr is treated as a villain for running against Hamilton's father-in-law in an election, trying to mediate arguments instead of exacerbating them, and advising Hamilton to be more pleasant and flexible with people (not to mention encouraging Hamilton to be happy now and then - especially at his own wedding). While some of Burr's later actions really are villainous, such as obsessively discriminating against immigrants, accusing Hamilton of embezzlement, betraying the Democratic-Republicans, and shooting Hamilton even after he forfeits the duel, his earlier "villainous" actions come off as this trope.
• The Giantess in Into the Woods. Her only real crime is not being human. She treated Jack kindly and protected him from her husband, and, in return, he robs her and kills her husband. If she was a human, Jack (who admits that he did it) would have been hauled off to jail, if not the chopping block. All the deaths in the second half are either accidents (because she can't see without her glasses) or caused by humans. There is even a scene in the second act deconstructing this, and discussing why she deserves to live less than Jack does. Eventually, the heroes recognize that her grief is as valid as theirs — but they still have to take her down, because she'll destroy the kingdom otherwise.
• Love Never Dies has a weird example with Erik, in that while he does do objectively villainous things like threaten to murder a child, that's not what the show attempts to make an issue. He's framed as screwing over Madame Giry and particularly Meg in favor of Christine, ungratefully forgetting everything they've done for him the second his old love interest walks in the door. Except he's...not, really? The Girys have central roles in a very lucrative business; they've hardly gone uncompensated. Textually, the worst thing he actually does to them is completely fail to notice that Meg did some sex work to scrape together their initial funding and hasn't been alright since.
• Ellen in Miss Saigon is often perceived as this by fans of the show, as she is seen as the obstacle to Kim and Chris reuniting. It's clear that the authors meant her to be sympathetic, though, and over the years they've repeatedly revised her part to make her more so.
• RENT: Benny is treated like a monster for getting married and expecting his friends to — GASP! — pay rent to live in a building. Despite him frequently going out of his way to help them, such as offering them jobs at Cyber Arts and paying for Mimi's rehab and Angel's funeral, they treat him with contempt.
• In the plays of William Shakespeare:
  • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet. Since Claudius killed Hamlet's father all by himself, he'd have no reason to confide in R&G or anyone else about it. So R&G might not have seen anything vile about obeying his summons to check out their old friend, Hamlet, and see if they can find out what's wrong with him. When Claudius sends R&G to England with Hamlet, he gives them a sealed envelope for the English which orders Hamlet's immediate execution. Since these orders are sealed, there's nothing to indicate R&G knew what those sealed orders were. Yet when Hamlet breaks into their cabin and opens the seal and reads the order, he changes the order making it for R&G's immediate executions. Since Hamlet gets kidnapped by pirates on the way to England, R&G would have no reason to deliver those sealed orders if they already knew what those orders originally were.
  • King Lear: Goneril and Regan, Lear's elder two daughters, are portrayed as villains because they lie to their father about how much they love him and later tell him that he has to send away some of his retinue of knights if he's going to stay with them. While it's true that they did exaggerate about their affection for Lear, they were doing so because he wanted them to — he was quite literally deciding how much of his kingdom they would get based on their answers, and Cordelia, who does genuinely love him, ends up being banished forever because she wouldn't kiss up to him. Furthermore, Lear acts like a completely spoiled brat while he stays with Goneril and Regan, hunting and living it up all day, then coming home (with a hundred men) and demanding to be waited on hand and foot while he and his knights carouse all evening—completely ignoring the fact that the princesses are trying to run the kingdom he left them. Granted, Goneril and Regan are far from saints, but they often seem more sympathetic and frustrated than evil. They do show unambiguously villainous colours, however, in fully condoning Cornwall's blinding of Gloucester.
  • The ultimate Shakespeare example might be Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. His name has become a slur synonymous with villainy, and the phrase "pound of flesh" has come to refer to anything given unfairly—but the thing of it is, within the play, Shylock didn't do anything wrong. The contract that he and Antonio form is honest and legally binding; there's no coercion involved. Of course, Shylock could have taken the other characters' offer to buy out the contract for double its worth, but that doesn't make his insistence on sticking to the bond illegal. So why is he such a villain? Because he's Jewish, and when the play was written, Christianity was the dominant religion of England.^note Which had expelled all its Jews more than 300 years before, so it's unlikely Shakespeare had even ever met one. That fact even explains his less-than-clear thinking on the matter: his only daughter elopes with a Christian man and converts to do so, leaving him without any descendants whatsoever. His insistence on clinging to the contract seems less like a villain scheming to hurt people and more like a broken, scared man desperately clutching at some semblance of order to keep himself sane. Virtually every contemporary production of Venice addresses this problem, and tries to find a way to reconcile the intense antisemitism of Shakespeare's time with more tolerant/open values.
  • Governor Cleon from Pericles, Prince of Tyre, who is innocent of Dionyza's attempt to murder Marina and horrified when he finds out. The other characters, and the narrative itself, blame him for what she did, and he ends up punished alongside her with what is presented as a Karmic Death.
• The Sound of Music has The Baroness. In the musical, the only thing she did wrong was be rich, disliked by the children (and even then, only in comparison to Maria), and choosing not to cause any trouble with Germany to save their heads. She was made a little cattier in the movie, but really at worst she was just preventing Maria from moving in on her fiance. And then there's the live Carrie Underwood show, where, thanks to a virtuoso performance by Laura Benanti, many viewers were rooting for her over Maria!
• The Duke of Castile in Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. He's a rather oppressive father to Bel-imperia but otherwise not a bad guy, and actually tries to investigate and mitigate his son's villainy, but he is still eternally punished along with the villains of the story in the final scene.

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