To Speak Properly of Miracles

Act two, scene three in All's Well That Ends Well begins with a speech by an elderly French nobleman (and arguably the most sensible person in Shakespeare's unsettling comedy), lamenting the then fashionable (i.e., Protestant) opinion about the status of miracles: They say that miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless (2.3.1-3).Lafeu gives skeptical voice to the idea that the age of miracles had ceased, as the commonplace phrase had it. 1But many who believed the miraculous actions attested to in the Bible, necessary to prove the new faith that was forming, also seemed certain that these extraordinary interventions into human history were not part of Christianity's post-Apostolic history. 1 See, for example, Richard Bancroft, who says that it was after the death of the Apostles when that power to work miracles ceased, in