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The Crucible, Arthur Miller's award-winning dramatization of the tragic events in Salem, Massachusetts during the summer of 1692, initially elicited scorn and derision by critics when first staged in 1953, but has since become, perhaps, the author's best-known, and certainly most oftenproduced, play. The portrayal of religious zealotry, political xenophobia, mass hysteria, sexual intrigue, and personal redemption provide themes that resonate with audiences worldwide.
In 1961, Robert Ward1 set Miller's play for the musical stage, and it, in turn, has become the composer's best-known work. What is perhaps less known is the extent to which Miller, Ward, and Ward's librettist, Bernard Stambler,2 collaborated in recasting the play into a vehicle more appropriate for operatic treatment.
Arthur Miller and TheCrucible
In September, 1950, the Internal Security Act made it legal to withhold passports and governments jobs from those who had been associated with the Communist Party. In essence, this made membership in the Communist Party a crime. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin became the self-proclaimed champion of anti-communism in 1950 by falsely claiming to have uncovered 205 persons in the State Department who were or had been members of the Communist Party (Johnson and Johnson 131-35).
It is generally assumed that Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible purely as a condemnation of Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. But this reason was only one of several. Miller first became aware of the Salem witchcraft trials as a student at the University of Michigan in the 1930s. When the Senate hearings were taking place in Washington, D.C., Miller came upon a copy of Marion Starkey's book, The Devil in Massachusetts (1950). Enthralled by the details of the story, he began to see a connection between himself, the events of seventeenth-century Salem, and twentieth-century Washington. As he once observed,
. . . something which seemed more weird and mysterious . . . was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far Right was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new subjective reality, a venerable mystique which was gradually assuming even a holy resonance.
(qtd. in Blau, Impossible Theater 188; Ferres, Interpretations 61)
On the dramaturgical level, Miller was drawn to the analogous historical events of seventeenth-century Salem and twentieth-century Washington because...