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to ENGLISH II HONORS HOMEEnglish II
Honors
A Survey of American Fiction and Nonfiction
Mrs.Crawford
Historical Inaccuracies from the Crucible
*
Betty Parris's mother was not dead, but very much alive at the time. She
died in 1696, four years after the events. Betty was shuttled off to live in
Salem Town with Stephen Sewall's family (Stephen was the brother of Judge Samuel
Sewall) soon after the hysteria broke and she did not participate in most of the
proceedings.
*
The Parris family also included two other children -- an older brother,
Thomas (b. 1681), and a younger sister, Susannah (b. 1687) -- not just Betty and
her cousin Abigail.
*
Miller admits in the introduction to the play that he boosted Abigail
Williams' age to 17 even though the real girl was only 11, but he never mentions
that John Proctor was 60 and Elizabeth, 41, was his third wife. Proctor was not
a farmer but a tavern keeper. Living with them was their daughter aged 15, their
son who was 17, and John's 33-year-old son from his first marriage. Everyone in
the family was eventually accused of witchcraft. Elizabeth Proctor was indeed
pregnant, during the trial, and did have a temporary stay of execution after
convicted, which ultimately spared her life because it extended past the end of
the period that the executions were taking place.
*
The first two girls to become afflicted with Betty Parris and Abigail
Williams, not Ann Putnam, and they had violent, physical fits, not a sleep that
they could not wake from.
*
There never was any wild dancing rite in the woods led by Tituba, and
certainly Rev. Parris never stumbled upon them. Some of the local girls had
attempted to divine the occupations of their future husbands with an egg in a
glass -- crystal-ball style. Tituba and her husband, John Indian (absent in
Miller's telling), were asked by a neighbor, Mary Sibley, to bake a special
"witch cake," -- made of rye and the girls' urine, fed to a dog --
European white magic to ascertain who the witch was who was afflicting the
girls.
*
The Putnam's daughter was not named Ruth, but Ann, like her mother,
probably changed by Miller so the audience wouldn't confuse the mother and the
daughter. In reality, the mother was referred to as "Ann Putnam
Senior" and the daughter as "Ann Putnam Junior."
*
Ann/Ruth was not the only Putnam child out of eight to survive infancy.
In 1692, the Putnams had six living children, Ann being the eldest, down to
1-year-old Timothy. Ann (the mother) and her sister, however did lose a fair
number of infants, and by comparison, the Nurse family lost remarkably few for
the time.
*
Rev. Parris claims to Giles Corey that he is a "graduate of
Harvard" -- he did not in fact graduate from Harvard, although he had
attended for a whileand dropped out.
*
The judges in The Crucible are
Samuel Sewall, Thomas Danforth, and John Hathorne. Sewall was one of the
original magistrates, and quit because of the reservations portrayed in the
play. Danforth was the Deputy Governor and was one of those involved in the
later "clean-up" trials after the Court of Oyer and Terminer was
disbanded by Governor Phips in October -- which did not execute anyone -- but he
was not a magistrate for the initial hearings and depositions. Hathorne,
Jonathan Corwin, and Benjamin Gedney were the primary magistrates who carried
out the investigations in the summer of 1692. Depositions were taken initially
in Ingersoll's Tavern, then moved to the Salem Village meeting house for reasons
of space, but the trials themselves were held sometimes months after these
hearings, in Salem Town, with a jury.
*
Rebecca Nurse was hanged on July 19, John Proctor on August 19, and
Martha Corey on September 22 -- not all on the same day on the same gallows. And
the only person executed who recited the Lord's Prayer on the gallows was Rev.
George Burroughs -- which caused quite a stir since it was generally believed at
the time that a witch could not say the Lord's Prayer without making a mistake.
They also would not have been hanged while praying, since the condemned were
always allowed their last words and prayers.
*
Reverend Hale would not have signed any "death warrants," as he
claims to have signed 17 in the play. That was not for the clergy, but the
judiciary.
*
The elderly George Jacobs was not accused of sending his spirit in
through the window to lie on the Putnam's daughter -- in fact, it was usually
quite the opposite case: women such as Bridget Bishop were accused of sending
their spirits into men's bedrooms to lie on them. In that period, women were
perceived as the lusty, sexual creatures whose allure men must guard against!
*
The hysteria did not die out "as more and more people refused to
save themselves by giving false confessions," as the epilogue of the movie
states. The opposite was true: more and more people gave false confessions to
save themselves as it became apparent that confession could save one from the
noose. What ended the trials was the intervention of Governor William Phips, who
had been off in Maine fighting the Indians in King William's War. There were
over two hundred people in prison when the general reprieve was given, but they
were not released until they paid their prison fees. Neither did the tide turn
when Abigail Williams accused Rev. Hale's wife, as the play claims -- although
the "afflicted" did start accusing a lot more people far and wide to
the point of absurdity, including various people around in other Massachusetts
towns whom they had never laid eyes on, including notable people such as the
famous hero Capt. John Alden (who escaped after being arrested).
*
Abigail Williams probably couldn't have laid her hands on 31 pounds in
Samuel Parris' house, to run away with John Proctor, when Parris's annual salary
was contracted at 66 pounds, only a third of which was paid in money. The rest
was to be paid in foodstuffs and other supplies, but he even then, he had
continual disputes with the parishioners about supplying him with much-needed
firewood they owed him.
*
Certain key people in the real events appear nowhere in Miller's play:
John Indian, Rev. Nicholas Noyes, Sarah Cloyce, and most notably, Cotton Mather.
*
Giles Corey was not executed for refusing to name a witness, as portrayed
in the movie. The play is accurate: he was accused of witchcraft, and refused to
enter a plea, which held up the proceedings, since the law of the time required
that the accused enter a plea. He was pressed to death with stones, but the
method was used to try to force him to enter a plea so that his trial could
proceed. Corey probably realized that if he was tried at all, he would be
executed, and his children would be disinherited. (Interestingly, Miller wrote
both the play and the screenplay... Who knows why he changed it to a
less-accurate explanation for his punishment and execution?)
*
"The afflicted" was not just a group of a dozen teenage girls
-- there were men and adult women who were also "afflicted," including
John Indian, Ann Putnam, Sr., and Sarah Bibber.
* There's a tiny scene in the movie with a goat getting into someone's garden and tempers flaring -- the actual history is that three years before the witchcraft accusations, a neighbor's pigs got into the Nurse family's fields, and Rebecca Nurse flew off the handle yelling at him about it. Soon thereafter, the neighbor had an apparent stroke and died within a few months. This was seen as evidence in 1692 of Rebecca Nurse's witchcraft.
(found at http://www.ogram.org/17thc/crucible.shtml)