The Crucible
The Crucible is a play written by Arthur Miller in 1953. It is based on the events surrounding the 1692 witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts. Miller wrote about the event as an allegory for McCarthyism and the Red Scare, which occurred in the United States in the 1950s. Miller was himself questioned by the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956.
The play was first performed on Broadway on January 22, 1953. The reviews of the first production were hostile, but a year later a new production succeeded and the play became a classic. Today the play is often studied in high schools around the country and even parts of other nations.
The play has been adapted for film twice, once by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1957 film Les Sorcières de Salem and nearly forty years later by Miller himself, in the 1996 film of the same name; Miller's adaptation earned him an Academy Award nomination. The play was also adapted by composer Robert Ward into an opera, which was first performed in 1961 and received the Pulitzer Prize.
Historical Road to the Crucible
Miller himself has stated that he wrote the play to comment on the parallels between the unjust Salem Witch Trials and the Second Red Scare from 1948 to 1956. During McCarthyism, the United States was terrified of Communism's influence. Like the witches on trial in Salem, Communists were viewed as having already silently infiltrated the most vital aspects of American life and security, presenting a clear and present danger to the community at large.
Political dissedents at the time were regarded with suspicion, and to many under the influence of the Red Scare hysteria, presented an unsubstantiated threat to national security. The implication of a person's name offered up to the House of Un-American Acts Committee by a testifying witness carried the same weight as a condemning, irrefutable evidence of guilt, and any refusal to name names by a witness was a clear sign of a Communist conspiracy. Miller, seeking to protect his business and personal friends from a prevailing hysteria of injustice, and admitting in private his own desire to keep inner-conscience involatile, refused to testify to the Committee and was blacklisted by the American government.
Many of Miller's peers, fearing the wrath of the court, provided names of their associates who might hold "communists" alignment in an attempt to save themselves. Miller, portraying a stark similarity between the collaboraters of both the McCarthy era and the Salem Witch trials, depicts dishonorable neighbors accussing each other falsely to save themselves from the high court. To Miller, only those who refuse to cooperate to such a system of plain injustice to the point of death, notably John Proctor and the seven condemned villagers who hang with him for their silence, hold onto their honor and sense of self and die as vindicated martyrs.
Important characters
The play includes characters based on John Proctor, Abigail Williams, Tituba Motif, Reverend John Hale, Elizabeth Proctor, Reverend Parris, Ezekiel Cheever, Rebecca Nurse, Giles Corey, Betty Parris, Thomas Danforth, Thomas Putnam, and Ann Putnam, among others. Some characters, especially the judges, are composites of several people from the actual events, and some of them had their names, ages, or personalities changed to make for a more appealing drama.
References
Arthur Miller, Why I Wrote "The Crucible", published in the October 21 and October 28, 1996 issues of The New Yorker, pages 158–164.