" The Crucible is a powerful play, eminently stageworthy, which has demonstrated repeatedly that it can have a very strong effect on an audience. Partly because of that power, it is sometimes misunderstood. It has been seen as a criticism of accused spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and as an attack on the House Committee on Un-American Activities. It has been dismissed as didactic melodrama, and praised as profound tragedy."
-taken from Arthur Miller by Neil Carson
Quotes by Arthur Miller on tragedy:
[ taken from Conversations with Arthur Miller edited by Matthew C. Roudané
]
"…the less capable a man is of walking away from the central conflict of a play, the closer he approaches the tragic existence."
"…if we're going to talk about tragedy at all, it seems to me that we've got to find some equivalent to that superhuman schema that had its names in the past, whatever they were. Whether they went under the name of Zeus's laws, or as in Shakespearean times, reflected a different ideology toward man they also had lying in the background somewhere an order which was being violated and which the character was seeking to come to some arrangement with…"
"…the reason we can't, I don't think, no longer really get a grasp on tragedy is because of the absence of a religion, and that what we've got left is the human half of the old Greek and old Elizabethan process. The psychology of man is basically unchanged. It has to be or we wouldn't be able to watch Shakespeare anymore with any emotion; we would simply be like archaeologists. But we don't look at it like archaeologists. We're moved by it, we're suspended by it, we're shocked by it and all the rest of it."
[ In response to the question "..is it also true of Reverend Hale in
The Crucible? (that he feels partly responsible and partly guilty, but
not entirely responsible and entirely guilty) ]
"..in a way it is. You see, what Hale is saying - he's got the line something
to the effect that life is holy and therefore anything that takes it …
you see, when Elizabeth Proctor says, "It's the devil's argument," it
is - it's devilish - because it leads one to indifference of a sort. That's
the tragic dilemma in The Crucible, by the way. Hale is saying
a very profound truth.. ( "Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift"
) "
"..the way to enhance life is under no circumstances to urge anyone to sacrifice himself. Well, the tragic time comes when in order to save his soul a man feels the necessity (and I think we don't want to do it ourselves, but we sense the value of him [ i.e. Proctor ] doing it) of sacrificing himself. And that to me is a tragic dilemma."