- 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
The cardinal tells Christ, who has returned to Earth as a mortal, why Christians throughout the West will ultimately submit to the Church and abandon its pursuits of knowledge and truth. His references to “freedom, free reason, and science” allude to the burgeoning Scientific Revolution, which started in the mid-sixteenth century when the Inquisition was powerful and threatened to stifle scientific progress. The cardinal argues that reason will only confuse people (“lead them into such a maze”) by showing them things that may be too wondrous for most to understand (“such miracles and insoluble mysteries”). The cardinal is a cynic…