Erin Doherty and the cast of The Crucible
National Theatre London, 2022
Photo by Johan Persson

Salem facts and Miller’s invention
The Salem Witch Trials took place in Salem Village, Massachusetts from February 1692 to May 1693. In all 200 people were accused, 30 found guilty, and 19 hanged. Giles Corey was pressed to death for refusing to plead, as told in the play, and five more people died in jail. As we noted in the podcast, the majority of those convicted were women; nearly 80%.

The two girls at the centre of events were Betty Paris and Abigail Williams, the daughter and the niece of Reverend Samuel Parris. The girls were actually only nine and eleven years old respectively, and the real John Proctor was sixty at the time. He had sired seventeen children, not all of whom survived, and married three times, his first two wives having died. His third wife, Elizabeth, was pregnant with their seventh child during the witchcraft trials.

Miller increased the ages of the girls in order to create the sexual undercurrents in the play, and specifically the liaison between Abigail and John, which motivates her calling out Elizabeth Proctor. In fact Mrs Proctor was first accused by Ann Putnam Jr, whose family may have resented John Proctor’s financial success. Abigail Williams and the other girls then joined the chorus of her accusers. From his research in Salem, Miller later said that he was intrigued by the fact that Abigail refused to single out John Proctor in her prosecution, focussing solely on calling out his wife, Elizabeth. He described what he called “the hard evidence of what would become my play’s centre: the breakdown of the Proctor’s marriage and Abigail Williams’s determination to get Elizabeth murdered so that she could have John, whom I deduced that she had slept with while she was her house servant, before Elizabeth fired her.”  He clearly filled in a blank with his own invention.

When Abigail Williams and Betty Parris displayed signs of illness they first pointed the finger of witchcraft at the Parris’s black slave Tituba. Tituba was an easy target, being a slave without anyone to defend her. As in the play, she initially denied the charge, but with no way out she deflected the charge onto Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good. She also described seeing supernatural animals, including a yellow bird, as the girls do in the courtroom in the play.

Although Abigail and Betty were the first to be struck with the mysterious ‘affliction’, eventually grown women and men also exhibited symptoms of bewitchment. The people afflicted began to complain that spirits were stabbing them, choking them, and jabbing them with pins. The recorded testimony of the Reverend John Hale described the Parris girls’ affliction as “beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect”. The girls screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions. There is certainly drama in this vivid description that hardly needed enhancing in Miller’s recreation of the girls’ courtroom hysterics.