The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts by Arthur Miller (English) Paperback Book

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"Earlier version copyright under title Those familiar spirits"— T.p. verso.

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The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft—and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village.First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witchhunting, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil. It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can."A drama of emotional power and impact" —New York Post

Back Cover

A classic of the American theater-Arthur Miller's tense, ingeniously multilayered drama of principle and paranoia The place is Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, an enclave of rigid piety huddled on the edge of a wilderness. Its inhabitants believe unquestioningly in their own sanctity. But in Arthur Miller's edgy masterpiece, that very belief will have poisonous consequences when a vengeful teenager accuses a rival of witchcraft-and then when those accusations multiply to consume the entire village. First produced in 1953, at a time when America was convulsed by a new epidemic of witchhunting, The Crucible brilliantly explores the threshold between individual guilt and mass hysteria, personal spite and collective evil. It is a play that is not only relentlessly suspenseful and vastly moving but that compels readers to fathom their hearts and consciences in ways that only the greatest theater ever can.

Author Biography

Arthur Miller was one of the most acclaimed and influential playwrights of the twentieth century, whose notable works include The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, A View From The Bridge and All My Sons, all of which are available in full cast recordings from L.A. Theatre Works.

Table of Contents

The Crucible " cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5" border="0"A Note on the Historical Accuracy of This Play Act One (An Overture) Act Two Act Three Act Four Echoes Down the Corridor Cast Appendix

Review Quote

Winner of the National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters

Excerpt from Book

THE CRUCIBLE ARTHUR MILLER was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1964), Incident at Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), and The American Clock (1980). He has also written two novels, Focus (1945) and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books of photographs by Inge Morath. His most recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), and Mr . Peters'' Connections (1999), Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000, and On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001). He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY has published more than twenty books on British and American culture. His works include studies of African-American writing, American theater, English drama, and popular culture. He is the author of two novels, Hester and Pearl, and he has written plays for radio and television. He is also a regular broadcaster for the BBC. He is currently professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England. BY ARTHUR MILLER DRAMA The Golden Years The Man Who Had All the Luck All My Sons Death of a Salesman An Enemy of the People (adaptation of a play by Ibsen) The Crucible A View from the Bridge After the Fall Incident at Vichy The Price The American Clock The Creation of the World and Other Business The Archbishop''s Ceiling The Ride Down Mt. Morgan Broken Glass Mr. Peters'' Connections ONE-ACT PLAYS A View from the Bridge, one act version, with A Memory of Two Mondays Elegy for a Lady (in Two-Way Mirror) Some Kind of Love Story (in Two-Way Mirror) I Can''t Remember Anything (in Danger: Memory!) Clara ( in Danger: Memory!) The Last Yankee OTHER WORKS Situation Normal The Misfits (a cinema novel ) Focus ( a novel ) I Don''t Need You Anymore ( short stories) In the Country (reportage with Inge Morath photographs) Chinese Encounters (reportage with Inge Morath photographs) In Russia ( reportage with Inge Morath photographs ) Salesman in Beijing (a memoir) Timebends ( autobiography ) Homely Girl, A Life (novella) Echoes Down the Corridor (essays) On Politics and the Art of Acting COLLECTIONS Arthur Miller''s Collected Plays (Volumes I and II) The Portable Arthur Miller The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller ( Robert Marin, editor) VIKING CRITICAL LIBRARY EDITIONS Death of a Salesman (edited by Gerald Weales) The Crucible (edited by Gerald Weales ) TELEVISION WORKS Playing for Time SCREENPLAYS The Misfits Everybody Wins The Crucible Table of Contents Cover About the Authors Also by Arthur Miller Title Page Copyright Page Introduction A Note on the Historical Accuracy of This Play ACT ONE - (AN OVERTURE) ACT TWO ACT THREE ACT FOUR ECHOES DOWN THE CORRIDOR THE CRUCIBLE APPENDIX - ACT Two, SCENE 2 INTRODUCTION In 1692 nineteen men and women and two dogs were convicted and hanged for witchcraft in a small village in eastern Massachusetts. By the standards of our own time, if not of that, it was a minor event, a spasm of judicial violence that was concluded within a matter of months. The bodies were buried in shallow graves or not at all, as a further indication that the convicted had not only forfeited participation in the community of man in this life, but in the community of saints in the next. Just how shallow those graves were, however, is evident from the fact that the people buried there were not eradicated from history: their names remain with us to this day, not least because of Arthur Miller, for whom past events and present realities have always been pressed together by a moral logic. In his hands the ghosts of those who died have proved real enough even if the witches they were presumed to be were little more than fantasies conjured by a mixture of fear, ambition, frustration, jealousy, and perverted pride. In 1957 the Massachusetts General Court passed a resolution stating that "No disgrace or cause for distress" attached itself to the descendants of those indicted, tried, and sentenced. Declaring the proceedings to be "the result of popular hysterical fear of the Devil," the resolution noted that "more civilized laws" had superseded those under which the accused had been tried. It did not, however, include by name all those who had suffered, and it was not until 1992 that the omissions were rectified in a further resolution of the court. It had taken exactly three hundred years for the state to acknowledge its responsibility for all those who died. This was the long-delayed end of a story whose beginnings lay in the woods that surrounded the village of Salem when, in 1692, a number of young girls were discovered, with a West Indian slave called Tituba, dancing and playing at conjuring. To deflect punishment from themselves they accused others, and those who listened, themselves insecure in their authority, acquiesced, partly because it served their interests to do so and partly because they inhabited a world in which witchcraft formed a part of their cosmology. Their universe was absolute, lacking in ambivalence. There was only one text to consult, and that text reserved only one fate for witches. Why should it have taken so long to acknowledge error? More significantly, why offer apology at all for an event so long in the past? Perhaps because the needs of justice and the necessity for sustaining the authority of the court have not always been coincident and because there will always be those who defend the latter, believing that by doing so they sustain the possibility of the former. Perhaps because there are those who believe that authority is all of a piece and that to challenge it anywhere is to threaten it everywhere. It was not the first such apology. In 1711 the governor of Massachusetts, acting on behalf of the general court of the province, set his hand to a reversal of attainder that offered restitution for this miscarriage of justice. In particular he granted one hundred and fifty pounds damages to John and Elizabeth Proctor. Elizabeth had survived, by virtue of the child she carried. Her husband was not so lucky; he was executed on August 19, 1692. His accusers were young girls, barely on the verge of puberty. Perversely, damages were paid not only to the victims but also to such people as William Good, who was his wife''s accuser, and Abigail Hobbs, a "confessed witch" who became a hostile witness. The affair, it seemed, was to be treated as a general calamity from which all suffered and in which the state was essentially innocent. Indeed the incident was ascribed to "The Influence and Energy of the Evil Spirits so great at that time," a time that, despite the declared purpose of the document, was described as being "Infested with a horrible Witchcraft." Arthur Miller first encountered the story of Salem and its witches while a student at the University of Michigan. It stayed in his mind, but only as one of those mysterious incidents from a past separated from us by more than time: "It never occurred to me that I would ever deal with it ... because I had never formulated an aesthetic idea of this tragedy." Then, in 1949, he came upon a new book about the trials, by Marion Starkey, called The Devil in Massachusetts. Not the least fascinating aspect of the book lay in the fact that the author recognized the dramatic potential of the events. Claiming to have tried to "uncover the classic dramatic form of the story itself" Starkey insisted that "here is real Greek tragedy," with "a beginning, a middle and an end." Interestingly, in the notebook Arthur Miller started at this time, he noted that "It must be ''tragic''" and, when The Crucible opened in New York, in 1953, he remarked, "Salem is one of the few dramas in history with a beginning, a middle and an end." Starkey recognized, too, a truth that has always lain at the center of Miller''s own approach to theater and the public world it shadows: The human reality of what happens to millions is only for God to grasp; but what happens to individuals is another matter and within the range of mortal understanding. The Salem story has the virtue of being a highly individualized affair. Witches in the abstract were not hanged in Salem; but one by one were brought to the gallows such diverse personalities as a decent grandmother grown too hard of hearing to understand a crucial question from the jurors, a rakish, pipe-smoking female tramp, a plain farmer who thought only to save his wife from molestation, a lame old man whose toothless gums did not deny expression to a very salty vocabulary.... And after you have studied their lives faithfully, a remarkable thing happens; you discover that if you really know the few, you are on your way to understanding the millions. By gr

Details ISBN0140481389 Author Arthur Miller Short Title CRUCIBLE Pages 152 Publisher Penguin Books Series Penguin Plays Language English ISBN-10 0140481389 ISBN-13 9780140481389 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 812.52 Year 1976 Publication Date 1976-10-31 Residence US Birth 1915 Death 2005 Imprint Penguin Books DOI 10.1604/9780140481389 Audience General/Trade We've got this

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