Miller himself said, "The play is not reportage of any kind The "important theme" that Miller was writing about was clear to many observers in at the play's opening. Despite the obvious political criticisms contained within the play, most critics felt that "The Crucible" was "a self contained play about a terrible period in American history.
Over twenty years after the opening of the play, the eighty-one-year-old Miller wrote the screenplay for the production of a movie version of "The Crucible. Additionally, the movie was been changed from the play in some minor respects. For example, the movie opens with a scene of the town girls sneaking into the woods and participating is a ritualistic dance with the slave woman Tituba--until they are all caught by the minister.
I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in ; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of , as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other.
But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned. In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I believed, a play became possible. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth.
There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil. All this I understood. I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere, or from purely social and political considerations.
My own marriage of twelve years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul. Moving crabwise across the profusion of evidence, I sensed that I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play began to accumulate around this man.
But as the dramatic form became visible, one problem remained unyielding: so many practices of the Salem trials were similar to those employed by the congressional committees that I could easily be accused of skewing history for a mere partisan purpose. Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious—that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists.
And the irony is that klatches of Luciferians exist all over the country today; there may even be more of them now than there are Communists. As with most humans, panic sleeps in one unlighted corner of my soul.
This anxiety-laden leap backward over nearly three centuries may have been helped along by a particular Upham footnote. After all, only the Devil could lend such powers of invisible transport to confederates, in his everlasting plot to bring down Christianity. It was as though the court had grown tired of thinking and had invited in the instincts: spectral evidence—that poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy—made a kind of lunatic sense to them, as it did in plot-ridden , when so often the question was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind.
The breathtaking circularity of the process had a kind of poetic tightness. Not everybody was accused, after all, so there must be some reason why you were.
By denying that there is any reason whatsoever for you to be accused, you are implying, by virtue of a surprisingly small logical leap, that mere chance picked you out, which in turn implies that the Devil might not really be at work in the village or, God forbid, even exist. Therefore, the investigation itself is either mistaken or a fraud. You would have to be a crypto-Luciferian to say that—not a great idea if you wanted to go back to your farm.
The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on.
Apparently, certain processes are universal. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable And so the evidence has to be internally denied.
Mary Warren is described as being a year-old when she was actually 20 years old. Miller describes a scene where Tituba and the afflicted girls dance in the woods and are discovered by Reverend Samuel Parris.
The character Reverend Samuel Parris states that he graduated from Harvard but in real life Parris dropped out before he could graduate. Betty Parris is described as being comatose and unresponsive when in actually she was instead experiencing violent fits. Giles Corey was indeed tortured for standing mute, but not for refusing to name other suspected witches. In actuality, he stood mute when he was asked the customary question of whether he would accept a trial by a jury of his peers.
Miller most likely changed these small details for a variety of reasons, such as to better fit his narrative, reduce the number of characters, simplify the timeline, make the relationships between the characters clearer and basically just to make the story flow better.
The actual events of the Salem Witch Trials were very complicated and there were hundreds of people involved so it is a challenge sometimes to retell the story without confusing the audience. It would make sense that Miller might change some things to make the story simpler and easier to understand. Without it, the details of the actual Salem Witch Trials could get lost or confused with the details of the play and then our understanding of this chapter in American history would be flawed and inaccurate.
Sources: Miller, Arthur and Christopher Bigsby.
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