Neither he nor the Salem magistrate John Hathorne make any attempt to quarantine the afflicted girls and interview them separately or to match the teeth marks on the victims to the dentistry of the accused, even though several of the so-called witches are wholly lacking in teeth. Stoughton is so determined to prosecute anyone accused of witchcraft that he goes against all the prevailing advice of the time in accepting spectral evidence. The lead villain in Schiff’s account (a figure who is absent from Miller’s play) is William Stoughton, chief justice of the court. This is not the tale of a good man who discovers his own goodness too late, but the story of hundreds of innocent people flailing in the face of a few powerful men.

In some respects, the events that unfold in Schiff’s book are more upsetting than those in The Crucible. But whatever liberties Miller took with his main characters, his interpretation of the events in Salem seems to accord with Schiff’s, even if he was primarily concerned to demonstrate the parallels with McCarthyism. In real life John Proctor was in his 60s and Abigail Williams (with whom there is no evidence he had an affair) was 11 in turning them into lovers, Miller made his Proctor 35 and Abigail 17. It turns out that all his characters are drawn from history, most of them fairly accurately. The only possible way to save yourself was to confess.Įnthusiasts of The Crucible will be curious to learn how much of Miller’s play is true. It is also because there was nothing to be gained from publicly expressed scepticism. This is partly because the stories of witchcraft were so vividly and specifically rooted in the surroundings that they could easily metamorphose from fantasies to memories. It is clearer here than in Miller’s play how difficult it would have been to escape the mass hysteria clearer that we cannot be complacent in assuming that we would have been on the side of the sceptics. This strategy enables Schiff to recreate the confusion of Salem at the time.

Absurdly, we see John Proctor simultaneously lecturing the town meeting on the dangers of mass hysteria, devilishly sitting on the marshal’s lap and leaping astride the minister’s dog. Thus we learn that “skimming groves of oak, mossy bogs and a tangle of streams”, two middle-aged women flew on a pole across Salem, covering in a flash ground that would have required three-and-a-half hours on a horse. There is only a thin layer of reproving sarcasm to draw attention to the impossibility of the more far-fetched events. Schiff has had the inspired idea of juxtaposing fantasy and reality, so that the supernatural activities are presented matter-of-factly alongside the more prosaic ones.

The witches salem 1692 by stacy schiff