Arthur Miller's The Crucible: Background and Sources

Arthur Miller's The Crucible: Background and Sources ROBERT A. MARTIN WHEN THE CRUCIBLE opened on January 22, 1953,1 the term "witchhunt " was nearly synonymous in the public mind with the Congressional investigations then being conducted into allegedly subversive activities. Arthur Miller's plays have always been closely identified with contemporary issues, and to many observers the parallel between the witchcraft trials at Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and the current Congressional hearings was the central issue of the play. Miller has said that he could not have written The Crucible at any other time,2 a statement which reflects both his reaction to the McCarthy era and the creative process by which he finds his way to the thematic center of a play. If it is true, however, that a play cannot be successful in its own time unless it speaks to its own time, it is also true that a play cannot endure unless it speaks to new audiences in new times. The latter truism may apply particularly to The Crucible, which is presently being approached more and more frequently as a cultural and historical study rather than as a political allegory. Although The Crucible was written in response to its own time, popular interest in the Salem witchcraft trials had actually begun to surface long before the emergence of McCarthyism. There were at least two other plays based on the witchcraft trials that were produced shortly before The Crucible opened: Child's Play by Florence Stevenson was produced in November, 1952 at the Oklahoma Civic Playhouse ; and The Witchfinders by Louis O. Coxe appeared at about the same time in a studio production at the University of Minnesota.3 279 280 ROBERT A. MARTIN Among numerous other works dealing with Salem witchcraft, a novel, Peace, My Daughter by Shirley Barker, had appeared as recently as 1949, and in the same year Marion L. Starkey had combined an interest in history and psychology to produce The Devil in Massachusetts , which was based on her extensive research of the original documents and records. Starkey's announced purpose was "to review the records in the light of the findings of modern psychology," and to supplement the work of earlier investigators by calling attention to "a number of vital primary sources of which they seem to have been ignorant."4 The events that eventually found their way into The Crucible are largely contained in the massive two volume record of the trials located in the Essex County Archives at Salem, Massachusetts, where Miller went to do his research. Although he has been careful to point out in a prefatory note that The Crucible is not history in the academic sense, a study of the play and its sources indicates that Miller did his research carefully and well. He found in the records of the trials at Salem that between June 10 and September 22, 1692, nineteen men and women and two dogs were hanged for witchcraft, and one man was pressed to death for standing mute.5 Before the affair ended, fiftyfive people had confessed to being witches, and another hundred and fifty were in jail awaiting trial. Focusing primarily upon the story of John Proctor, one of the nineteen who were hanged, Miller almost literally retells the story of a panic-stricken society that held a doctrinal belief in the existence of the Devil and the reality of witchcraft. The people of Salem did not, of course, invent a belief in witchcraft; they were, however, the inheritors of a witchcraft tradition that had a long and bloody history in their native England and throughout most of Europe. To the Puritans of Massachusetts, witchcraft was as real a manifestation of the Devil's ' efforts to overthrow "God's kingdom" as the periodic raids of his Indian disciples against the frontier settlements. There were, surprisingly, few executions for witchcraft in Massachusetts before 1692. According to George Lyman Kittredge in his Witchcraft in Old and New England, "not more than half-a-dozen executions can be shown to have occurred."6 But the people of Salem village in 1692 had recent and-to them-reliable evidence that the Devil was at work in...