THE CRUCIBLE ARTHUR CONTENTS MILLER Who was Arthur Miller? Page 2 History in The Crucible • Seventeenth century Massachusetts Page 4 • The United States in the 1950s Page 6 The Crucible • The characters Page 7 • Plot summary Page 8 Miller’s skill as a storyteller • The title Page 12 • Language Page 12 • Pace and structure Page 13 Themes Page 13 Sources and recommended reading Page 14 Image shows Iain Glen as John Proctor Photography: David Scheinmann Who was Arthur Miller? Arthur Miller is generally recognised as the greatest American playwright of the twentieth century. His plays challenge the assumptions of US society and ask people to think about their responsibilities to each other. Arthur Miller’s plays pleased critics and audiences. He was awarded the Pulitzer prize for literature, and honorary degrees from Oxford and Harvard Universities. He was popular in the US and beyond: most of his plays were produced across Europe soon after their premieres in New York. One of his most famous plays, The Death of a Salesman, was staged in China in 1983 and was a huge success. It is said that not a day goes by when one of Miller’s plays is not being performed somewhere in the world. So what makes Arthur Miller such a popular writer? His characters were ordinary people who audiences could sympathise with; the dialogue is clear and recognisable but full of character; he wrote about issues like personal freedom, duty and honour – these are big topics but everyone has experience of them. Arthur Miller Arthur Miller’s life Arthur Miller was able to write so well about the Miller was clearly bright but without financial experience of being American because in many backing from his parents had no hope of ways his life was typical for someone growing up going straight from high school to university. through the twentieth century. He did various odd jobs before saving enough to enrol at the University of Michigan He was born in New York in 1915 and lived in the in 1934. He started off studying journalism, northern district of Harlem. At the time Harlem was but when his first play They Too Arise won a well-off district where most families (including an award he switched to English. the Millers) were Jewish. In the 1920s Arthur, his father Isidore, his mother Augusta and his brother After university, Miller spent just over a year Kermit moved to Brooklyn, across the East River working for the Federal Theatre Project in from Manhattan. New York before government funding was withdrawn and the project closed. He Miller’s father Isidore was a clothing manufacturer. continued to write (mostly radio plays) Well into Arthur’s teens the business did well and alongside other jobs including a spell the Millers lived a comfortable life. Then in the collecting dialects in North Carolina for the 1930s the American economy collapsed. All over Library of Congress (the national library) and America hundreds of thousands of farms and a job as a shipfitter’s assistant in the businesses ran into serious trouble. Isidore’s firm Brooklyn Naval Yard. was no exception and the sudden transformation in the Miller family fortunes was a big influence on Miller and his views on life and politics. 2 © RSC Learning 2006 Arthur Miller’s life In 1940 Arthur Miller married Mary Grace Slattery and they had their first child, Jane, in 1944. In the same year Miller’s play The Man Who Had All the Luck was performed on Broadway, but closed after just six performances. A lengthy Broadway run was the benchmark of success in the American theatre at this time: Miller achieved this in 1947 with All My Sons, a play about an aircraft manufacturer cutting corners on US air force planes during the Second World War. Although some people criticised the play as unpatriotic it was popular enough with audiences. By 1947 Miller was doing well enough financially to buy two homes – a city flat in New York and a farmhouse in Connecticut where he did most of his writing for the rest of his life. All My Sons began a run of successful work for Miller. Death of a Salesman came out in 1949 and won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. The Crucible was first performed in 1953. A View From the Bridge had its first performance in 1955. In 1956 Miller published a short story called The Misfits in Esquire magazine, which was made into a film starring Marilyn Monroe, John Huston, Montgomery Clift and Clark Gable and released in 1961. Alongside his success as a writer, the 1950s had two other significant features for Miller: love and politics. In 1951 he met Marilyn Monroe. The media has always portrayed Miller and Monroe as an odd couple but they had a serious relationship. Miller divorced Mary Slattery in 1956 and married Marilyn the same year. They were married for five years and their marriage broke up during the filming of The Misfits. Miller was never keen to discuss the marriage with the media but he did write about it in his autobiography Timebends (1987). Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 and Miller married again, to a photographer called Inge Morath. This marriage lasted until Inge died in 2002. In politics Miller became involved with a circle working for greater understanding between the United States and the communist Soviet Union. This brought Miller head-to-head with the HUAC - the House Un-American Activities Committee, a government committee set up to keep an eye on people who the government felt were dangerously left-wing or communist. For more on this, see the section History in The Crucible on page 11. Miller continued to write until his death in 2005. He never regained the same levels of popularity in the US that he had in the 1950s and early 1960s but many of his new plays were produced in London right up to the turn of the century and the older plays continued to be performed all over the world. As the president of the international writers’ organisation PEN, Miller continued to work for improved relations between the communist countries of the East and the capitalist democracies of the West. His status as one of the greatest playwrights of the century was beyond question. His last play, Finishing the Picture premiered in 2004 and he died on 10 February 2005. 3 © RSC Learning 2006 History in The Crucible Seventeenth century Massachusetts The story of The Crucible is based on real events that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. In January that year, a group of teenage girls seemed to be suffering from a strange illness. The illness was blamed on witchcraft and there was an official investigation – by April over 300 suspected witches had been imprisoned. In June 1692 the death penalty was introduced as a punishment for witchcraft. The first person to be hanged was a woman called Bridget Bishop. Five more women, including the real Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Good, were hanged in July. Court official read Giles’ petition A man called John Proctor was concerned at the way torture was being used to make people confess. He wrote to the minister of Boston asking for an investigation but he was ignored. In August he was hanged along with four others. His wife Elizabeth was pregnant and so escaped hanging. Eight more people were hanged before the trials came to an end in September. Later the government acknowledged that the convictions and executions had been a mistake. Miller’s script for The Crucible begins with ‘A note on the historical accuracy of this play’. He says that the play is ‘not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian’. Miller wasn’t trying to give a 100% accurate account of events in Salem in 1692. What he was trying to show is what it felt like to be involved in those events and the forces at work to make such terrible events possible. Before writing the play Miller researched original historical documents, including records of the witchcraft trials. Even if the events are not a precise record of what actually happened, other aspects of John is hanged the play are an accurate reflection of life in seventeenth century Massachusetts. 4 © RSC Learning 2006 History in The Crucible Beliefs about witchcraft Many of the supposed signs of witchcraft are mentioned in the play – the power to fly, reading books, muttering curses and making potions with live animals. In Act 3, Abigail accuses Mary Warren of ‘sending out her spirit’ against her, and this was supposed to be another power of witches. Names In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an estimated 60,000 people were executed for The names of the characters in The Crucible are witchcraft in Europe and North America. Most were taken from the trial records. Miller’s historical note poor and old and often single women who had says that the way each person’s story ends, whether nobody to stand up for them. In England the last it be by hanging like John Proctor and Rebecca witchcraft trial took place in 1712. Nurse, being crushed by stones like Giles Corey or escaping death like Elizabeth Proctor, is true to It was not just religious, superstitious or history. Other details have changed, for example uneducated people who believed in witches. King John Proctor was an innkeeper, not a farmer. James VI of Scotland (who later became King James I of England) wrote a book about witches Another detail of the naming is also historically called Daemonologie published in 1597.