THE CRUCIBLE BY ARTHUR MILLER Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” is a play about the Salem witch trials in 1960. These were classic examples of mass hysteria, resulting in the hanging of a great many respectable men and woman of charges of trafficking with the devil. They were convicted by people at least as respectable as themselves, largely on the evidence of four young girls who had been caught dancing in the moonlight and laid their …showed first 75 words of 619 total…

…showed last 75 words of 619 total…by “confession” –not foe a cause, not for “civil rights,” not even to defeat the error that hanged them, but for their own credit on earth and in Heaven: they would not say that they were witches when they were not. They lived in a universe where each man was saved or damned by himself, and what happened to them was personal. Certainly their fate is not lacking in universal significance; it was human fate.