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For this unit, we are building a student playlist with songs corresponding to The Crucible. Students can post their Spotify link to add songs; remember to keep it school-appropriate.

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The presentation from the beginning of the week.

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Arthur Miller's essay on the reasoning for writing The Crucible

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An artist's answer to politics.

As I watched "The Crucible" taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film's having been made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the fifties. But there they are-Daniel Day-Lewis (John Proctor) scything his sea-bordered field, Joan Allen (Elizabeth) lying pregnant in the frigid jail, Winona Ryder (Abigail) stealing her minister-uncle's money, majestic Paul Scofield (Judge Danforth) and his righteous empathy with the Devil-possessed children, and all of them looking as inevitable as rain.

I remember those years-they formed "The Crucible" 's skeleton-but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. I remember how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of "Incident at Vichy," showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. They watched as Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self-gratified grin on his face, his body swivelling rather cutely, and they giggled at his overacting.

Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling-if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler's snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat's eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.

McCarthy's power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red-especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. McCarthy-brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true-boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had "lost China" and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department-staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents-was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that.

If our losing China seemed the equivalent of a flea's losing an elephant, it was still a phrase-and a conviction-that one did not dare to question; to do so was to risk drawing suspicion on oneself. Indeed, the State Department proceeded to hound and fire the officers who knew China, its language, and its opaque culture-a move that suggested the practitioners of sympathetic magic who wring the neck of a doll in order to make a distant enemy's head drop off. There was magic all around; the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue. How could one deal with such enormities in a play?

"The Crucible" was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma-the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But 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.

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 left could not look straight at the Soviet Union's abrogations of human rights. The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees. The far right, meanwhile, was licking up all the cream. 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.

President Truman was among the first to have to deal with the dilemma, and his way of resolving it-of having to trim his sails before the howling gale on the right-turned out to be momentous. At first, he was outraged at the allegation of widespread Communist infiltration of the government and called the charge of "coddling Communists" a red herring dragged in by the Republicans to bring down the Democrats. But such was the gathering power of raw belief in the great Soviet plot that Truman soon felt it necessary to institute loyalty boards of his own.

The Red hunt, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and by McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche. It reached Hollywood when the studios, after first resisting, agreed to submit artists' names to the House Committee for "clearing" before employing them. This unleashed a veritable holy terror among actors, directors, and others, from Party members to those who had had the merest brush with a front organization.

The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation; the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires. Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us-indeed, from me. In "Timebends," my autobiography, I recalled the time I'd written a screenplay ("The Hook") about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I. Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents, and simply change them to Communists. When I declined to commit this idiocy (Joe Ryan, the head of the longshoremen's union, was soon to go to Sing Sing for racketeering), I got a wire from Cohn saying, "The minute we try to make the script pro-American you pull out." By then-it was 1951-I had come to accept this terribly serious insanity as routine, but there was an element of the marvellous in it which I longed to put on the stage.

In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one's teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma. Yet I kept being drawn back to it.

I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867-a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem-that I knew I had to write about the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem's past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.

I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692, as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. "During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam"-the two were "afflicted" teen-age accusers, and Abigail was Parris's niece-"both made offer to strike at said Procter; but when Abigail's hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter'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 small 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 center of all this turmoil.

All this I understood. I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere, or from purely social and political considerations. 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 paralyzing 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. Moving crabwise across the profusion of evidence, I sensed that I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play began to accumulate around this man.

But as the dramatic form became visible, one problem remained unyielding: so many practices of the Salem trials were similar to those employed by the congressional committees that I could easily be accused of skewing history for a mere partisan purpose. Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious-that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists. In the seventeenth century, however, the existence of witches was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America; and even lawyers of the highest eminence, like Sir Edward Coke, a veritable hero of liberty for defending the common law against the king's arbitrary power, believed that witches had to be prosecuted mercilessly. Of course, there were no Communists in 1692, but it was literally worth your life to deny witches or their powers, given the exhortation in the Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." There had to be witches in the world or the Bible lied. Indeed, the very structure of evil depended on Lucifer's plotting against God. (And the irony is that klatches of Luciferians exist all over the country today; there may even be more of them now than there are Communists.)

As with most humans, panic sleeps in one unlighted corner of my soul. When I walked at night along the empty, wet streets of Salem in the week that I spent there, I could easily work myself into imagining my terror before a gaggle of young girls flying down the road screaming that somebody's "familiar spirit" was chasing them. This anxiety-laden leap backward over nearly three centuries may have been helped along by a particular Upham footnote. At a certain point, the high court of the province made the fatal decision to admit, for the first time, the use of "spectral evidence" as proof of guilt. Spectral evidence, so aptly named, meant that if I swore that you had sent out your "familiar spirit" to choke, tickle, or poison me or my cattle, or to control my thoughts and actions, I could get you hanged unless you confessed to having had contact with the Devil. After all, only the Devil could lend such powers of invisible transport to confederates, in his everlasting plot to bring down Christianity.

Naturally, the best proof of the sincerity of your confession was your naming others whom you had seen in the Devil's company-an invitation to private vengeance, but made official by the seal of the theocratic state. It was as though the court had grown tired of thinking and had invited in the instincts: spectral evidence-that poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy-made a kind of lunatic sense to them, as it did in plot-ridden 1952, when so often the question was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind.

The breathtaking circularity of the process had a kind of poetic tightness. Not everybody was accused, after all, so there must be some reason why you were. By denying that there is any reason whatsoever for you to be accused, you are implying, by virtue of a surprisingly small logical leap, that mere chance picked you out, which in turn implies that the Devil might not really be at work in the village or, God forbid, even exist. Therefore, the investigation itself is either mistaken or a fraud. You would have to be a crypto-Luciferian to say that-not a great idea if you wanted to go back to your farm.

The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler's Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked off, or farmers in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks vanishing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in 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.

I was also drawn into writing "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. "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," Deodat Lawson, one of the great witch-hunting preachers, said in a sermon. Lawson rallied his congregation for what was to be nothing less than a religious war against the Evil One-"Arm, arm, arm!"-and his concealed anti-Christian accomplices.

But it was not yet my language, and among other strategies to make it mine I enlisted the help of a former University of Michigan classmate, the Greek-American scholar and poet Kimon Friar. (He later translated Kazantzakis.) 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. As in the film, nearly fifty years later, the actors in the first production grabbed the language and ran with it as happily as if it were their customary speech.

"The Crucible" took me about a year to write. With its five sets and a cast of twenty-one, it never occurred to me that it would take a brave man to produce it on Broadway, especially given the prevailing climate, but Kermit Bloomgarden never faltered. Well before the play opened, a strange tension had begun to build. Only two years earlier, the "Death of a Salesman" touring company had played to a thin crowd in Peoria, Illinois, having been boycotted nearly to death by the American Legion and the Jaycees. Before that, the Catholic War Veterans had prevailed upon the Army not to allow its theatrical groups to perform, first, "All My Sons," and then any play of mine, in occupied Europe. The Dramatists Guild refused to protest attacks on a new play by Sean O'Casey, a self-declared Communist, which forced its producer to cancel his option. I knew of two suicides by actors depressed by upcoming investigation, and every day seemed to bring news of people exiling themselves to Europe: Charlie Chaplin, the director Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, Donald Ogden Stewart, one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood, and Sam Wanamaker, who would lead the successful campaign to rebuild the Old Globe Theatre on the Thames.

On opening night, January 22, 1953, I knew that 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. It seems to me entirely appropriate that on the day the play opened, a newspaper headline read "ALL THIRTEEN REDS GUILTY"-a story about American Communists who faced prison for "conspiring to teach and advocate the duty and necessity of forcible overthrow of government." 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 each other. The critics were not swept away. "Arthur Miller is a problem playwright in both senses of the word," wrote Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, who called the play "a step backward into mechanical parable." The Times was not much kinder, saying, "There is too much excitement and not enough emotion in 'The Crucible.' " But the play's future would turn out quite differently.

About a year later, a new production, one with younger, less accomplished actors, working in the Martinique Hotel ballroom, played with the fervor that the script and the times required, and "The Crucible" became a hit. The play stumbled into history, and today, I am told, it is one of the most heavily demanded trade-fiction paperbacks in this country; the Bantam and Penguin editions have sold more than six million copies. I don't think there has been a week in the past forty-odd years when it hasn't been on a stage somewhere in the world. Nor is the new screen version the first. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Marxist phase, wrote a French film adaptation that blamed the tragedy on the rich landowners conspiring to persecute the poor. (In truth, most of those who were hanged in Salem were people of substance, and two or three were very large landowners.)

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, especially in Latin America, "The Crucible" starts getting produced wherever a political coup appears imminent, or a dictatorial regime has just been overthrown. From Argentina to Chile to Greece, Czechoslovakia, China, and a dozen other places, the play seems to present the same primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded in the brain of social man.

I am not sure what "The Crucible" is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something I'd not have dreamed of forty years ago. For others, it may simply be a fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play-the blind panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness. Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in Stalin's Russia, Pinochet's Chile, Mao's China, and other regimes. (Nien Cheng, the author of "Life and Death in Shanghai," has told me that she could hardly believe that a non-Chinese-someone who had not experienced the Cultural Revolution-had written the play.) But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days. The film, by reaching the broad American audience as no play ever can, may well unearth still other connections to those buried public terrors that Salem first announced on this continent.

One thing more-something wonderful in the old sense of that word. I recall the weeks I spent reading testimony by the tome, commentaries, broadsides, confessions, and accusations. And always the crucial damning event was the signing of one's name in "the Devil's book." This Faustian agreement to hand over one's soul to the dreaded Lord of Darkness was the ultimate insult to God. But what were these new inductees supposed to have done once they'd signed on? Nobody seems even to have thought to ask. But, of course, actions are as irrelevant during cultural and religious wars as they are in nightmares. The thing at issue is buried intentions-the secret allegiances of the alienated heart, always the main threat to the theocratic mind, as well as its immemorial quarry. ♦

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From 1996: Arthur Miller shares the story behind his play about the Salem witch trials.

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Even in the 21 st Century, if you went to Rebecca Nurse's house, in what used to be Salem Village, and knock on the door, someone fascinating would open it.

I discovered this when I visited Salem in 2005, driving there to do some research for a university production of The Crucible. Salem is about an hour's drive due northeast from Boston and in the late 17 th Century, it was a bustling seaport known as Salem Town. To say that Salem still remembers its malefic past is an understatement. In addition to the Salem Witch Museum (great gift shop, by the way), there is the Salem Witch Village, the Salem Witch Wax Museum, and, in a truly breathtaking flight (literally) of fancy, Count Dracula's Castle. To be fair, there are some historical landmarks there, including the village hall where some of the witch trials took place, but the real site of the events in The Crucible is in a town called Danvers, known until 1752 as Salem Village.

Danvers is about five miles away, across a small river, to the northwest. It is surrounded by small towns (called parishes then) that figure prominently in the play's story, including Beverly, which was the home of Reverend John Hale, and Peabody, where the Proctor's farm stood. At the very end of the 17 th Century, when the witch trials took place, Salem Village encompassed a wide swath of neighboring farms and, given how hard travel was in those days, the village kept its distance from Salem Town. In fact, scholars claim that tensions between Salem Town and Salem Village-the village wanted more autonomy and tax exemption-was one of the many reasons for the accusations of witchcraft. Still, Salem Village petitioned for and received its own clergyman-and within only eight years, they went through four ministers. They finally confirmed, by 1692, Reverend Samuel Parris, whom, by all accounts, was not liked very much by anyone either. The site of Parris's church is one of Danvers' historical landmarks to this day. And right across the street is, still standing on its original property, the house of Rebecca and Francis Nurse.

When I drove up the rough path that leads to the house, it was bitterly cold, but there her house stood, solid among the scraggly trees and rough-hewn split-rail fences. I walked around the estate and noticed the replica of the Salem Meeting House that had been built, as my Chamber of Commerce brochure told me, for a PBS movie about the witch trials. A slightly gnarled older man opened the back door and asked me what I was doing there. Startled, I felt like Dorothy and her three friends when they got to Oz and that funny little man demanded, " Who rang that bell?" I explained to the gentleman that I was teaching The Crucible and came up to do some research. "Are you teaching it as fiction or history?" he inquired pointedly. Now, I felt like Rebecca Nurse herself, three centuries earlier, being asked an abstruse question that clearly had a very right answer and a very wrong one. But I had a feeling that I knew what the gentleman was after. "Oh, fiction, fiction," I replied. "Good," he beamed, as he opened the door for me to enter the vestibule, "because it's not history."

And therein lies the crux of the matter.

Arthur Miller makes no bones about his creative interpretation of the facts of the case. The first sentence of the published version of the play concerns "A Note on the Historical Accuracy of This Play": "This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian." Indeed, there is considerable variance between the actual events of the witch trials and the play, and they make for fascinating comparisons. The comparisons are not going to be used as a cudgel with which to beat Arthur Miller but, rather, as a way to get to a more resonant reading of the play.

The facts, recorded with the utmost brevity, are these: In the early part of January, 1692, the nine-year-old daughter of Reverend Parris, Betty, and her eleven-year-old cousin, Abigail Williams, exhibited bizarre and seemingly unprovoked behavior: seizures, trances, blasphemous screaming. Utterly bewildered, Parris called in a local doctor, who, unable to find any physical cause for their tortures, professed the girls to be under the spell of Satan. Parris soon led the villagers in various fasts and prayers for the girls' souls and called in several other local clergymen, including Reverend John Hale. Within weeks, similar symptoms had affected eleven other girls and women of Salem Village, including two teenagers: Mercy Lewis and Mary Warren, the servant of a respected farmer in his 50s, John Proctor, and his third wife, Elizabeth.

Through the exponentially frightening torments of these women, some clear details emerged: they were all being tormented by three local women who had the power of witchcraft: Tituba, a West Indian enslaved by Reverend Parris; Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne-middle-aged housewives who were not particularly beloved by the community. Two magistrates, Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, called the women in for examination. In a breach of judicial etiquette still shocking, the women were questioned in the presence of their accusers; the girls lapsed into the same bewitched pyrotechnics during the examination, further inflaming the situation. Tituba confessed to consorting with the devil and implicated the other two as witches; all three were moved to a Boston jail to await a further trial.

This did little to untangle the situation; within days, the bewitched girls named four more members of the community, including a fine upstanding woman, Rebecca Nurse, and a five-year-old girl named Dorcas Good. (Dorcas was eventually released after four months, but, accordingly to her father, was traumatized into imbecility for the rest of her life.) In March and April, the frenzy of accusation spread through the community like kerosene in a hayloft. Untold locals of Salem Village stepped forward to proclaim that they saw their neighbors flying through the air, or signing the book of Satan, or talking to animals, or wreaking subtle havoc on their property or livestock. Dozens more, including the Proctors, were brought in to be examined by local magistrates-almost always in the presence of the frenzied accusers-sometimes stripped and searched for "witchmarks," and imprisoned. Amazingly, according to the custom of the time, the accused were billed for their "lodging" in jail.

One might well wonder why there was no trial of these individuals, let alone even a kangaroo court to try them. Sadly, and probably fatally for some, Salem was still under the jurisdiction of the British Crown and the Massachusetts Bay Colony had been negotiating a proper charter for months with the authorities in England. In other words, there was no trial, because there was no recognized government for a brief period in the spring of 1692-a period that corresponded exactly to the time of the witchcraft accusations. Finally, at the end of May, charter negotiations had progressed far enough that a "proper" court was convened by the Governor of the colony. Seven distinguished legal minds were appointed as justices, including (but not prominently) John Danforth.

The justices conducted themselves as best they knew how, but their methods weren't simply shoddy by our standards, they were nearly certifiably insane. The bodies of the accused were searched for satanic disfigurements; they were asked to perform supernatural feats; they were brought into contact with their accusers to see if their very proximity induced bewitched behavior (surprise: it almost always did). Most controversially, the judges allowed for "spectral evidence" in the court; i.e., testimony from witnesses that they had seen the accused in ghost-like form tormenting cattle, or roaming around the neighborhood in the dark of night. This is why it is essential for civilized societies to have rules of evidence.

After two weeks of hearings, the jury brought down its sentence on June the second: a woman named Bridget Bishop was to be hanged as a witch on "Gallows Hill," to the west of Salem Town. (Witches were always hanged, never burned, as their punishment.) Over the summer of 1692, the jury returned twenty-seven convictions of witchcraft; nineteen people were hanged; another five died while in prison, and one brave old man, named Giles Corey, was "pressed to death"-heavy stones placed on his body-while the authorities vainly tried to exact a confession from him. Eight women were convicted, but released, including Elizabeth Proctor, who was with child. Two of the accused women confessed to being witches and were reprieved-paradoxically, if you admitted to being a witch, you were freed. One of these women was Tituba, who was there at the beginning, nine months earlier; she was sold back into slavery. A year later, in 1693, authorities began to question the proceedings and there were many acts and deeds of contrition, shame, and official exoneration. As late as 1957, the Massachusetts General Court officially absolved one of the women of the crime of witchcraft; but, by then, the country was in the midst of another witch hunt.

These, then, are the facts (and, trust me, this was as brief as I could make them). The court records of the time are quite clear, with some exceptions. This is what happened. Yet, even now, three centuries later, we do not know why it happened.

Many theories abound. The result of tensions and conflicts between Salem Town and Salem Village; between disputative neighbors. The inflamed emotions of some bored prepubescent girls, locked in a quotidian existence of household drudgery. An epidemic of fungus in local bread, called "ergot," which is a mild hallucinogen. The most recent book on the subject, published two years ago, makes a persuasive case that the witchcraft hysteria was the result of the extended King Philip's War and King William's War in which the British settlers to the north of Massachusetts were being slaughtered and scalped by tribal nations in relentless raids on their communities. Several of the accusing girls were refugees from settlements destroyed by the Wampanoag nation-perhaps they were suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome and fearful of being attacked again. Perhaps the judges in the witchcraft trials needed to displace their failure in protecting their citizens from the devastations of war, and so used the pitiful settlers of Salem Village as scapegoats.

Perhaps, perhaps. Having wearied the reader already with the accounts of the actual trials, I will not subject her or him to an extensive comparison of these events with those in the play-you are clever enough to figure those out for yourself. Arthur Miller traveled to Salem and did his research in the local archives and was inspired-for his plot-by a conspicuous gap, it seemed to him, in the court records when it came to Abigail Williams's testimony against John Proctor. This opened the door to his own original thinking about the story; he arrived at the subtext through his own life and marriage and he nestled his story in the middle of his own strong feelings about the witch hunt of his own time during the McCarthy era and the House Committee for Un-American Activities.

Time has not been kind-nor should it be-to those "other men" of state administration whom Miller was attacking. But, I confess-there are many confessions in the world of The Crucible-upon research and reflection, to a certain sympathy for the justices in the Salem case. Why? They were simply stumbling in darkness. This was a pre-scientific society: Galileo had only been persecuted five decades earlier-much less time than between the HUAC hearings and now; Franklin was half-a-century away from flying his kite and discovering conductivity; the circulation of the blood was only a notion in the mind of Sir William Harvey. There were no videotapes or encyclopedias of witchcraft; indeed, there were only a handful of pamphlets and manuscripts on the subject-in England and the colonies put together-and they were woefully inadequate and contradictory. How could these men define witchcraft? Back then, there was no scientific proof that it didn't exist, let alone that it did. I hesitate to say that these men, by all accounts decent and learned men, were making it up as they went along. The image that comes to me is that of Wile E. Coyote, or some Warner Bros cartoon figure, trying to cross some chasm and walk across it by drawing a bridge in front of him, inch by inch, in the hope that it will exist out of sheer belief and carry him across the abyss. The justices in the Salem case were duty-bound to protect their citizens-yes, perhaps they scapegoated some to save others-and they used whatever tools, iron-bound, rusted, and inadequate though they were, to forge some bounds of security.

That one might be moved to sympathize with the lot of the judges in the case is yet another tribute to Miller's play. Every character is in a quest for certitude, whether it be moral certitude in the case of John Proctor, or evidentiary certitude, as in the case of Reverend Hale. We stumble in darkness, looking for whatever signpost or light we can find to take us to safety, to certainty. That Miller's play allows for such deep, contradictory, and moving readings is a tribute to his artistry. That our society, now in its fifth century away from the Salem Witch Trials, still seems mired in misplaced jurisprudence, excessive finger-pointing and spurious assertions, and blustering and aggressive claims of moral certainty is sad condemnation of where we've found ourselves.

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The witches and judges of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" | American Masters | PBS

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Even in the 21st Century, if you went to Rebecca Nurse's house, in what used to be Salem Village, and knock on the door, someone fascinating would open