Compare And Contrast The Salem Witch Trials Vs The Crucible

Michelle Rodriguez
10/30/17
Mr. O. Garza
3rd Blk (A-day)
Fuller

The Crucible
It’s 1692; the people of Salem, Massachusetts are under a government of theocracy and talk of a reverends daughter, Betty, has emerged. Rumors that Betty has been bewitched start to travel from ear to ear and her father isn’t very fond of it. The author Arthur Miller writes a very captivating, full of awe, play that makes you want to read unremittingly until the end. Arthur Miller bases the foundation of his play around one of the most infamous Salem Witch Trials. In fact, the play itself is very factual and somewhat historically accurate. He doesn’t change the first names of the main characters however he does omit some key characters, Miller however proceeds to

(Unknown. “The Salem Witch Trials Vs Arthur Miller's The Crucible”) There is many differences and misinterpretations that The Crucible has in comparison to what actually happened in Colonial America. The first example would be that, in the play Miller portrays Abigail as a young teenager of at least 17 years of age and at most 18 years of age. In the real Colonial America however, Abigail Williams was only 11 or 12 years old at the time of the trials. Also, Ruth, the Putnam's daughter, was actually not their only child. They had 6 living children. In the play, Reverend Parris tells Giles Corey that he is a "graduate of Harvard" when he did not graduate from Harvard, although he had attended the university for a while and later proceeded to drop out. This is a very small detail yet it could and did make a significant change to the plot and to the level of maturity of the play. Miller also chose to exclude and omit a few key characters from his play. Some of the main characters that do not appear in the play are Cotton Mather, and Sarah Osborne. One last and final example is that Arthur Miller describes Tituba as an African slave and from what research implies she was African. The research shows that Tituba was an Indian from the Caribbean island of Barbados. (History.com Staff. “Salem Witch Trials” A&E Television Networks.