Miracles of contingency: Pericles as a drama of possibility

This article argues that an exploration of contingency in Pericles is central to understand the play's achievement, which is born of the tensions the play sets up between narrative and dramatic accounts of experience, and vesting in the figure of Miranda an ‘otherness’ that opens possibilities that are foreclosed by an anthropocentric, law-based world view. The play's aesthetic is founded on this, and, indeed, on the contingent effect of its damaged state. This encourages an improvisatory approach to performance, which displaces the figure of the author just as the drama itself questions the role of the father.