The Historical Sources of the Play

Abstract

There are two periods of American history which provided the sources of the play: the Massachusetts Puritan colony at the end of the seventeenth century, and the McCarthy trials in the 1950s (see Section 2.7). In his Introduction to The Collected Plays, Miller has said: ‘I had known of the Salem witch hunt for many years before ‘McCarthyism’ had arrived. . . When I looked into it now [that is, in the 1950s], however, it was with the contemporary situation at my back, particularly the mystery of the hand ing over of conscience, which seemed to me the central and informing fact of the time.’ There are, however, several more parallels to be drawn between Massachusetts in 1692 and the United States in 1950.