Fact Fiction, by Margo Burns.Arthur Millers The Crucible Fact Fictionby Margo Burns.Revised 1. 03. 01.Ive been working with the materials of the Salem Witch Trials of 1.Ive seen the play or film The Crucible, and what I think of it.Miller created works of art, inspired by actual events, for his own artisticpolitical intentions.First produced. on Broadway on January 2.Communism. during the Cold War which resulted in the hearings by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities.In Millers play and screenplay, however, it is a lovelorn teenager, spurned by the married man she loves, who fans a whole community into a blood lust frenzy in revenge.This is simply not history.The real story is far more complex, dramatic, and interesting and well worth exploring.Miller himself had some things to say about the relationship between his play and the actual historical event that are worth considering.In the Saturday Review in 1.Henry Hewes quotes Miller as stating, A playwright has no debt of literalness to history.Free The Salem Witch Trials papers, essays, and research papers.Names Of Those Killed In The Salem Witch Trials' title='Names Of Those Killed In The Salem Witch Trials' />Right now I couldnt tell you which details were taken from the records verbatim and which were invented.I, on the other hand, can tell you, and that is the purpose of this essay.Whether this activity is worthwhile or not really depends on what one wants from the play or movie.I find that many people come across this unusual episode in American history through Millers story, and if they want to start learning what really happened in 1.Millers play and characters are so vivid, and he used the names of real people who participated in the historical episode for his characters.Miller wrote a Note on the Historical Accuracy of this Play at the beginning of the Viking Critical Library edition This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian.Dramatic purposes have sometimes required many characters to be fused into one the number of girls involved in the crying out has been reduced Abigails age has been raised while there were several judges of almost equal authority, I have symbolized them all in Hathorne and Danforth.However, I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history.The fate of each character is exactly that of his historical model, and there is no one in the drama who did not play a similar and in some cases exactly the same role in history.As for the characters of the persons, little is known about most of them except what may be surmised from a few letters, the trial record, certain broadsides written at the time, and references to their conduct in sources of varying reliability.They may therefore be taken as creations of my own, drawn to the best of my ability in conformity with their known behavior, except as indicated in the commentary I have written for this text.Miller clings to simultaneous claims of creative license and exactitude about the behavior and fate of the real people whose names he used for his characters.This is problematic for anyone who is beginning to take an interest in the historical episode, based on his powerful play.In Millers autobiography, Timebends A Life, originally published in 1.Miller recounts another impression he had during his research One day, after several hours of reading at the Historical Society.I got up to leave and that was when I noticed hanging on a wall several framed etchings of the witchcraft trials, apparently made by an artist who must have witnessed them.In one of them, a shaft of sepulchral light shoots down from a window high up in a vaulted room, falling upon the head of a judge whose face is blanched white, his long white beard hanging to his waist, arms raised in defensive horror as beneath him the covey of afflicted girls screams and claws at invisible tormentors.Dark and almost indistinguishable figures huddle on the periphery of the picture, but a few men can be made out, bearded like the judge, and shrinking back in pious outrage.Suddenly it became my memory of the dancing men in the synagogue on 1.Define witch hunt.English dictionary definition of witch hunt.An. Street as I had glimpsed them between my shielding fingers, the same chaos of bodily motion in this picture, adults fleeing the sight of a supernatural event in my memory, a happier but no less eerie circumstance both scenes frighteningly attached to the long reins of God.I knew instantly what the connection was the moral intensity of the Jews and the clans defensiveness against pollution from outside the ranks.Yes, I understood Salem in that flash it was suddenly my own inheritance.I might not yet be able to work a plays shape out of this roiling mass of stuff, but it belonged to me now, and I felt I could begin circling around the space where a structure of my own could conceivably rise.There are no extant.My best guess is that what Miller may.George H. Walker Co., drawn by Joseph E.Baker 1. 83. 7 1.See image to the right to compare with Millers description.Although it is fine. Dvd O Trio Do Brasil 40 Anos Download Itunes . Millers descriptions of his own research, however credible they may come across and however vivid an imprint they may have left on him, are riddled with inaccuracies, and memories Miller claims to have had of the primary sources, are seriously flawed.When the movie was released 1.Miller published an article in the New Yorker, discussing Why I Wrote The Crucible, in which he describes, over four decades after writing the play, what he remembered of his process with the material.He began by stating that he had read Salem Witchcraft It was not until I read a book published in 1.Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem that I knew I had to write about the period.It was in Uphams work that Miller encountered the description of a single gesture that inspired him 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 Parriss niece both made offer to strike at said Procter but when Abigails 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 Procters 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.This is terrific stuff for a fertile, creative mind see Records of the Salem Witch Hunt, No.Miller veered away from the historical record, imagining the backstory of this gesture Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigails 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.Thats fine fiction, as long as readers know that this was his creative mind at work not what really happened, but even in discussing his own work, Miller is often unable to tell what was historically true and what he had made up.In the introduction to his Collected Plays published in 1.Viking Critical Library edition, p.Miller claimed that the story of Abigail Williams as a servant in the Procter house was historically accurate I doubt I should ever have tempted agony by actually writing a play on the subject had I not come upon a single fact.It was that Abigail Williams, the prime mover of the Salem hysteria, so far as the hysterical children were concerned, had a short time earlier been the house servant of the Proctors and now was crying out Elizabeth Proctor as a witch but more it was clear from the record that with entirely uncharacteristic fastidiousness she was refusing to include John Proctor, Elizabeths husband, in her accusations despite the urgings of the prosecutors.This is also not historically accurate, beginning with Abigail never having been a maidservant in the Procter howusehold that was Mary Warren.The real Abigail Williams did cry out against John Procter on April 4, on the same day Elizabeth Procter was formally accused, although he was not included on the arrest warrant issued on April 8.See RSWH, Nos. 3.Miller continued to claim that it was a fact.
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