The Crucible

What the Salem records gave him, and what he changed

Four changes carry most of the play, and each one is a departure from the record Miller had read. The first is age. John Proctor was about sixty when he was accused, tried and hanged; the University of Virginia's Salem archive notes that Miller makes him roughly thirty years younger. A farmer in his thirties can have the affair the play needs him to have had. A farmer of sixty cannot, not with the girl in question.

The second change is Abigail Williams. The real Abigail was eleven or twelve, the niece of the Reverend Samuel Parris, and she gave formal testimony in seven cases and was involved in as many as seventeen capital ones. Miller makes her seventeen and gives her a past with John Proctor, which turns a village panic into a story with a motive at the centre of it. The affair is invented. The seventeen capital cases are not.

The third change is the circle of girls dancing in the woods under Tituba's direction. Miller's first act depends on it, and the Salem archive is blunt that the record does not support it: there is no evidence of group fortune-telling in the Parris household, and none linking Tituba to it. The Reverend John Hale wrote in 1702 that he knew one of the afflicted girls had tried fortune-telling to learn her future husband's trade, and he did not name her.

The fourth thing Miller did not change, and it is the engine of the play. Judge John Hathorne pressed the people he examined not only to confess but to name others who might be witches, and the archive calls that the move that accelerated the accusations. Tituba was the first accused and the first to confess, and her confession set the pattern the trials then followed: the accused confessed, became an accuser, and so confirmed everything said before. Miller found that mechanism in the 1692 records, and it was running again in Washington while he wrote.

A court that accepts what only the witness can see

Spectral evidence is testimony about what a witness says she saw in a vision, and the Salem court accepted it. That single rule of procedure makes the accusations unanswerable, because nothing the accused can produce counts against it. The real John Proctor challenged the court to reconsider whether such evidence should stand, and the challenge did not save him.

Miller builds the third act around that impasse rather than around a villain. Deputy Governor Danforth is not a fraud and is not stupid; he is a judge who has already hanged people on this evidence and cannot now concede that the evidence is worthless without conceding the hangings. Every reasonable-sounding thing he says follows from that position. Walter Hampden played him in 1953 and Ciarán Hinds in 2016.

The Reverend John Hale is the character who changes his mind, and Miller makes the change slow and reasoned. Hale arrives as the court's expert on witchcraft, gathers evidence in good faith, watches what the court does with it, and ends up begging the condemned to lie in order to live. E. G. Marshall created the part; Bill Camp was nominated for a Tony Award for it in 2016.

Rebecca Nurse shows how little the verdict had to do with the evidence. In 1692 the jury returned not guilty, was told to reconsider, and came back guilty; Governor William Phips pardoned her and was then persuaded to reverse the pardon; she was excommunicated and hanged on 19 July 1692. Miller does not dramatise that sequence, and a reader who knows it will hear the courtroom scenes differently.

The committee, and what Miller wrote into the margins

Miller did not leave the parallel to be inferred. The printed text carries prose commentary between the scenes, in his own voice rather than a character's. One of those passages states the case directly: a political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence. The sentence is about 1692 and about 1952 at once, and it is why a reader gets something an audience does not.

Political opposition is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior.

The parallel then closed on him in stages. In March 1954 the State Department refused him a passport to attend the Brussels premiere of the play. The rules cited denied passports to people believed to support the Communist movement. His reply to reporters was one sentence: that he was not supporting any communist movement. On 21 June 1956 he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee, admitted signing appeals put out by Communist-front organisations in the 1940s, denied ever taking Party orders, and refused to say who else had been in the room.

He was convicted of contempt of Congress in 1957. The United States Court of Appeals overturned the conviction in 1958. The play had cost him more than a passport in the meantime: the National Endowment for the Humanities records that its first reviews were unfavourable and that many colleagues kept their distance from him afterwards. Death of a Salesman went on being produced; The Crucible had to wait for the politics to move.

Why the play keeps being restaged as something else

Broadway has brought The Crucible back five times, and each production has found a different quarrel to attach it to. Jack Sydow's 1964 staging lasted sixteen performances. John Berry's 1972 production at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre used a set by Jo Mielziner, the designer of the first Death of a Salesman. Yossi Yzraely directed it at the Belasco Theatre in 1991.

Richard Eyre's 2002 revival, with Liam Neeson as John Proctor and Laura Linney as Elizabeth, took six Tony nominations and won none. Ivo van Hove staged it at the Walter Kerr Theatre in 2016 with Ben Whishaw as Proctor, Sophie Okonedo as Elizabeth and Saoirse Ronan as Abigail Williams, and set it in what looked like a schoolroom. Philip Glass wrote the score and won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play.

France took the play furthest, and changed it while doing so. Marcel Aymé's adaptation opened at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt in Paris on 16 December 1954, as Les Sorcières de Salem. Raymond Rouleau staged it, Yves Montand and Simone Signoret played the Proctors, and it ran more than 360 times over two seasons. Miller could not attend: the State Department had refused him the passport nine months earlier.

Jean-Paul Sartre then wrote the screenplay and dialogue for Rouleau's 1957 film of it, making the accused poor and their accusers propertied so that the panic became a class conflict. Miller's verdict, written thirty years later, was that Sartre had tossed an arbitrary Marxist mesh over the story. Miller wrote a screenplay of his own for the 1996 film with Daniel Day-Lewis, and it brought him the only Oscar nomination of his life, for Best Adapted Screenplay.