- All's Well That Ends Well
- Antony and Cleopatra
- As You Like It
- The Comedy of Errors
- Coriolanus
- Cymbeline
- Hamlet
- Henry IV, Part 1
- Henry IV, Part 2
- Henry V
- Henry VI, Part 1
- Henry VI, Part 2
- Henry VI, Part 3
- Henry VIII
- Julius Caesar
- King John
- King Lear
- Love's Labor's Lost
- A Lover's Complaint
- Macbeth
- Measure for Measure
- The Merchant of Venice
- The Merry Wives of Windsor
- A Midsummer Night's Dream
- Much Ado About Nothing
- Othello
- Pericles
- The Rape of Lucrece
- Richard II
- Richard III
- Romeo and Juliet
- Shakespeare's Sonnets
- The Taming of the Shrew
- The Tempest
- Timon of Athens
- Titus Andronicus
- Troilus and Cressida
- Twelfth Night
- The Two Gentlemen of Verona
- Venus and Adonis
- The Winter's Tale
Margaret is visiting the Higgins’ home for the first time, having met millworker Nicholas and his daughter, Bessy, in the streets of Milton. The dying Bessy and Margaret have just been speaking of Bessy’s yearning for heaven, and Bessy’s father has expressed impatience with this kind of talk. He argues that “Methodist fancies” like Bessy’s (a catch-all term for popular religious piety, not just Methodism) distract people from dealing with immediate problems. He maintains that his “creed” of paying attention to what a person sees and knows for certain isn’t hard to understand or to carry out. Higgins represents a…