ARTHUR MILLER: WHY I WROTE THE CRUCIBLE

…by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who despite their discomfort with the inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.


When Gentiles in Hitler’s Germany, saw their Jewish neighbours being trucked off…the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism, was quite naturally to turn away for fear of being identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish refugees, however, there was often a despairing pity mixed with “Well, they must have done something.” Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. 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.

In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference against which to gauge the action. In our lives in the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties, no such point existed anymore…The days of “J’accuse” were gone, for anyone needs to feel right to declare someone else wrong. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch. Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.


I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952…in the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692…It was from a report written by the Rev. Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch hunt.

“During the examination of Elizabeth Proctor, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam (both teenage accusers) both made offer to strike at Elizabeth Proctor; but when Abigail’s hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up into a fist before, and came down exceedingly lightly as it drew near to said Proctor, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Proctor’s hood very lightly. 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. Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail’s mistress and they had lived together in the same house until Elizabeth fired the girl. 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 centre of all this turmoil.

All this (the human centre of this turmoil) I understood…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 paralysing 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….a play began to accumulate around this man.


I was also drawn to The Crucible by the chance it gave me to use a new language – that of seventeenth century New England. That plain, craggy English was liberating in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness. Deodat Lawson, one of the great witch-hunting preachers said in a sermon,

“The Lord doth terrible things amongst us, by lengthening the chain of the roaring lion in an extraordinary manner, so that the Devil is come down in great wrath.”
…The problem was not to imitate the archaic speech but to try to create a new echo of it which would flow freely off American actors’ tongues.


On opening night, January 22 1953, I knew the atmosphere would be pretty hostile. The coldness of the crowd was not a surprise; Broadway audiences were not famous for loving history lessons, which is what they made of the play…Meanwhile the remoteness of the production was guaranteed by the director, Jed Harris, who insisted that this was a classic requiring the actors to face front, never to each other. Arthur Miller