The Crucible: Study Guides and Analysis

Load a series of short episodes analysing various aspects of the play, The Crucible.

"In his 1953 play The Crucible, playwright Arthur Miller employs a fictionalized account of Massachusetts Bay colonists accused of witchcraft in 1692 as a metaphor for government persecution of suspected communists during the mid-20th century ... "

"The Crucible takes place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. The action begins in the home of Reverend Parris, whose daughter Betty lies unconscious and appears very ill. Around midnight the night before, Parris had discovered Betty, his niece Abigail, and Tituba, his black slave, dancing in the woods, causing Betty to swoon. The local physician is unable to determine the cause of Betty's illness. Mr. and Mrs. Putnam arrive and reveal that their daughter Ruth is also ill. There is talk in the village of an unnatural cause ... "

An in-depth critical discussions of the controversial play by Arthur Miller.

"Salem. Small Massachusetts town on the Atlantic coast, about twenty miles northeast of Boston. A small community sandwiched between the ocean and the wilderness, Salem felt itself surrounded by danger, a danger that could be combated only by hard work, perseverance, and strict religious observance. The Native Americans living in the area presented a threat, but the devil, who lurked in the nearby wilderness, was a far greater threat, tempting villagers to worship him. The theocracy that governed Salem was designed to prevent this from occurring; thus any departure from orthodoxy was condemned, and any opposition was summarily crushed ... "

"The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that while Arthur Miller’s 1952 play The Crucible is often cited as a political allegory of the McCarthy era, analyzing various instances of irony and how language itself becomes almost criminal shows the play can also be interpreted as satire ... "

" From Arthur Miller's The Crucible students and teachers have studied the Salem witch trials as allegory for the Congressional hearings of the McCarthy era. But it is time for teachers to reexamine Miller's play within the context of the witch hunts rampant in current society ... "

"The purpose of the present analysis of “The Crucible” is to study the action of the play in terms of the implication of quest for identity of the characters involved by scrutinizing the various dilemmas into which the characters find themselves. The self of an individual becomes foregrounded in the moment of
crisis, which involves emotional, moral and social predicaments ... "

" ... Of course, by its nature the play has been interpreted in many ways as different societies and times suggested new applications, the individual finding him or herself attacked for imagined offences, or for a failure to conform to the prejudices and beliefs ... "

"Although Miller's tragedy occurs in seventeenth-century Salem, it is also intended to be a critique of the atrocities committed by Miller's contemporaries. In the 1950s, when the play was written, McCarthyism gripped America in a brutal crusade to purge it of suspected Communists.2 In the throes of such hysteria, our government hunted down innocent people, branded them disloyal, and denounced them ... "

"While at first glance you may wonder how McCarthyism and The Crucible are intertwined. Reading this article, you can quickly see many similarities between the play and the paranoia and fear surrounding the Communist threat in the 1950s ... "

" ALTHOUGH The Crucible is set in seventeenth-century America, Arthur Miller intended it as a comment on American life of his own time. For several years before the play opened in 1953, public investigations had been examining and interrogating radicals, former radicals, and possible former radicals, requiring witnesses to tell about others and not only about themselves ... "

"Abigail Williams, a strikingly beautiful seventeen-year-old. She is willful and a flirt. Her rebellion against society is expressed in her wayward behavior, which she transforms into a witch scare by going into fits and stimulating and coercing her girlfriends to do likewise. Abigail senses that the community of Salem, Massachusetts, is uneasy, that it suffers from societal tensions, and that it is prepared to believe that its internal divisions are the result of witchcraft. Abigail and her minions charge many of the most prominent people in Salem with practicing witchcraft ... "

" Commenting on the historical accuracy of his play The Crucible, Arthur Miller wrote: "The play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian.... However, I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history ... "

"This article analyzes Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) through a Nietzschean critique. In fact, Miller’s play presents a leading character whose individuality and interaction with his community, in terms of theology and politics, demands a re-evaluation of all values, much akin to the way Friedrich Nietzsche famously did in nineteenth-century Europe ... "

"... In this essay I focus on Miller's sensitivity to the need for the "glimpse of this brighter possibility" of what the character might have been as a fundamental element in the particular kind of tragedy that Miller wrote ... "

"While critics have certainly not ignored the fact that The Crucible's John Proctor is flawed, he is still viewed by many as the most heroic of Arthur Miller's male protagonists - nobly heading to a patently undeserved death to make a stand against tyranny and support his fellow citizen ... "

"Recently, the media has burst with stories about 15 teenagers in Le Roy, N.Y., where their tic-like symptoms and uncontrolled utterances have baffled local residents, school officials and families. The NYS Department of Health has been on the scene ..."