tand what happened in Salem in 1692 through the experience of one man, John Proctor.Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the style of The Crucible is its language. These people speak a dialect that is much closer to Shakespeare's English than to our own. Shakespeare's time was full of adventure and discovery, and his language reflected that excitement and energy.The Puritans themselves were outspoken. One reason they were driven to the New World in the first place was that they couldn't keep quiet about religious matters. And most of them came from the lower classes, whose language is generally very earthy.Add these things up, and then add in the rugged life these pioneers were forced to lead in the early years of American settlement, and you come up with a way of speaking that is sometimes called "muscular."Arthur Miller has made his characters speak the way they think--bluntly, directly, and with little concern for fancy phrase-making. He took some lines straight out of writings of the time, including transcripts of the witch trials. The result is a kind of rough poetry, sometimes of great power.^^^^^^^^^^THE CRUCIBLE: POINT OF VIEWArthur Miller has chosen to tell the story of the Salem witch trials from the point of view of one of its victims, John Proctor. This personalizes the story for us; by the end we know Proctor better than anyone else in the play, and we feel his suffering all the more intensely because we care about him. We also come to understand what happens by following and sharing Proctor's struggle to understand it himself.Proctor is an extremely attractive character. He is as good and honest as we ourselves would like to be, and yet he's not perfect. His mistakes are those of a human being, not a superman. By concentrating the action of the play on John Proctor, Arthur Miller makes it easy for us not only to sympathize, but also to identify with him and the other victims of the witch-hunt: we find out what it would fe...
