It is altogether possible that Mr. Arthur Miller was prompted to the composition of his latest play by the malign politico-cultural pressures of our society, but whatever the impulse, it has issued in a drama of arresting polemic distinction. With the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 as a moral frame and point of departure, Mr. Miller has gone on to examine the permanent conditions of the climate of hysteria. The New England tragedy was for him, dramatically, a fortuitous choice because it is accessible to us imaginatively; as one of the few severely irrational eruptions American society has witnessed, it retains still its primitive power to compel the attention. And it exhibits, moreover, the several features of the classically hysterical situation: the strange moral alchemy by which the accused becomes inviolable; the disrepute which overtakes the testimony of simple intelligence; the insistence on public penance; the willingness to absolve if guilt is confessed. It is imaginative terror Mr. Miller is here invoking: not the solid gallows and the rope appall him, but the closed and suffocating world of the fanatic, against which the intellect and will are powerless. It is a critical commonplace that the commitments of Mr. Miller's plays are ideological rather than personal--that he does not create a world so much in its simple humanity, or its perceptible reality, as in its intellectual alarms and excursions. The Crucible reinforces this tradition. (Source is taken from: Hayes, Richard. "Hysteria and Ideology in The Crucible (1953)." 2 Aug. 2004. 5 Oct. 2005  <>