Miracle Play

This text considers the notion of miracle in relation to the writings of Shakespeare and Derrida. Royle shows how the word ‘miracle’ comes, in the later sixteenth century, to acquire less narrowly religious senses, and how this dehiscence is at play in Shakespeare, especially in the figure of Falstaff, in Henry IV Part One. He explores some of the ways in which the history and development of the ‘miraculous’ prefigure the emergence of ‘the uncanny’ some two hundred years later. Particular attention is given to the affinities between the writings of Shakespeare and Cixous that transpire from reading Derrida on the miracle.