The subject of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible is the Salem witchcraft trials, and Miller uses the historical trials as a way of commenting on the nature of official oppression and bigotry as directed at a specific group in society. Miller's play was produced during the McCarthy era and was intended to comment directly on the "witch-hunts" of our own time as McCarthy and his cohorts ferreted out Communists everywhere as a way of promoting their own careers rather than the truth. The witchcraft in the play is built on historical evidence from the period as to the rationale offered by the Puritans for the witch hunt, historical analysis which has offered its own assessment of why the witch hunts developed and what purposes they served, and links with contemporary witch hunts to show how these processes and patterns of thought persist and continue to cause injustice in today's world.
Robert Warshow notes the issue of the degree to which The Crucible should be seen as commenting on the contemporary scene, and he notes that the audience for the play has been cautioned not to be misled by the obvious contemporary relevance because this is a drama of universal significance:
It means: do not be misled by the play's historical theme into forgetting the main point, which is that "witch trials" are always with us, and especially today; but on the other hand do not hold Mr. Miller responsible either for the inadequacies of his presentation of the Salem trials or for the many undeniable and important differences between those trials and the "witch trials" that are going on now (Warshow 210).
Warshow says that the original Salem trials were evidence of how far the Puritans would go in taking their doctrines seriously (211). The truth is that the depiction of the trials in The Crucible is based in part on actual testimony from the original trials, but what is really important is the way Miller has shaped these words into a universal...