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THE CRUCIBLE

by Arthur Miller

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Summer Reading Assignment Projects-2019

ELA 10th Graders - RISING 11 TH Graders

12th Grade Summer 2019 Reading Assignment  
(for previous 11th graders -  rising 12th graders)

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We are looking forward to getting to know you this upcoming school year as we make our way through a challenging, yet rewarding course. Attached is the summer reading packet and all the work that needs to be completed by the end of the first week of school.  All work needs to be typed and follow MLA format.  Please staple all of your work together!  Please note that you will be reading pre-reading information for The Crucible and the play The Crucible.
             

 ****You must make a copy in Google docs and so you can type your answers easily.****
 

The Crucible
Pre-Reading
In order to familiarize yourself with some of the underlying themes of Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, complete the following reading and questions:


            1) The Salem Witch Trials Webquest
            2) Why I Wrote The Crucible: An Artist's Answer to Politics

 

During Reading
As you read the play, complete the
1.      Character Actions/Motivations Chart
2.      Take any additional notes that could possibly help you on a test.  Keep track of major characters, events, and important plot lines.

 
Post Reading

Be prepared for a test on the play as well an in class writing assessment during the first full week of school.
 

Salem Witch Trials
Background Webquest
 

Directions:

In preparation for reading Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, you will journey to Salem, Massachusetts and learn about the real story behind this event.  Go the following websites to read and build your background knowledge of this part of history.
 
Go to http://www.salemweb.com and click on “About Salem,” then click on “Salem Witch Trials” and “Witches Today and Salem Witch Trials Memorial” to answer the following questions.
 
1.  Examine the painting at the top of the “Salem Witch Trials and Witches Today.” Identify three details/things that are happening in the painting. What impression does the painting give you of Salem in 1692?
 
2.  Define hysteria.
 
3.  How many people died as a result of the Salem Witch Trials?  How did they die?
 
4.  How was Giles Corey death different than the majority of the others?
 
 

Go to “About Salem” and click on “Salem Witch Trials Memorial.” Next, click on “Chronology” and answer the questions. 
 
5.  Describe the behavior the “inflicted” girls exhibited. What was the age range of the girls?
 
6. What conclusion did the townspeople draw about the girls’ behavior? What counter magic was used to counteract and identify the witches?
 
7.  Describe what majority (group) of Salem was targeted and accused as witches.
 
8. What criteria (provide 3-4) about witches did the Special Court of Oyer and Termini base its judgment?
 
9.  How long did the investigation continue before it was opposed or questioned?
 
10.  Based on what you learned from the webquest, describe the lasting impact the witch trials had on the Salem community.

 


Why I Wrote The Crucible: An Artist's Answer to Politics
By Arthur Miller

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I remember those years--they formed "The Crucible" 's skeleton--but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. I remember how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of "Incident at Vichy," showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. They watched as Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self-gratified grin on his face, his body swivelling rather cutely, and they giggled at his overacting.


Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling--if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler's snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat's eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.


McCarthy's power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became a expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red--especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. McCarthy--brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true--boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had "lost China" and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department--staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents-was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that.


"The Crucible" was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression--era trauma--the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors' violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.
President Truman was among the first to have to deal with the dilemma, and his way of resolving itself having to trim his sails before the howling gale on the right-turned out to be momentous. At first, he was outraged at the allegation of widespread Communist infiltration of the government and called the charge of "coddling Communists" a red herring dragged in by the Republicans to bring down the Democrats. But such was the gathering power of raw belief in the great Soviet plot that Truman soon felt it necessary to institute loyalty boards of his own.


The Red hunt, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and by McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche. It reached Hollywood when the studios, after first resisting, agreed to submit artists' names to the House Committee for "clearing" before employing them. This unleashed a veritable holy terror among actors, directors, and others, from Party members to those who had had the merest brush with a front organization.


The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation; the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires. Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us--indeed, from me. In "Timebends," my autobiography, I recalled the time I'd written a screenplay ("The Hook") about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I. Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents, and simply change them to Communists. When I declined to commit this idiocy (Joe Ryan, the head of the longshoremen's union, was soon to go to Sing Sing for racketeering), I got a wire from Cohn saying, "The minute we try to make the script pro-American you pull out." By then--it was 1951--I had come to accept this terribly serious insanity as routine, but there was an element of the marvelous in it which I longed to put on the stage.


"The Crucible" took me about a year to write. With its five sets and a cast of twenty-one, it never occurred to me that it would take a brave man to produce it on Broadway, especially given the prevailing climate, but Kermit Bloomgarden never faltered. Well before the play opened, a strange tension had begun to build. Only two years earlier, the "Death of a Salesman" touring company had played to a thin crowd in Peoria, Illinois, having been boycotted nearly to death by the American Legion and the Jaycees.


On opening night, January 22, 1953, I knew that the atmosphere would be pretty hostile. The coldness of the crowd was not a surprise; Broadway audiences were not famous for loving history lessons, which is what they made of the play. It seems to me entirely appropriate that on the day the play opened, a newspaper headline read "ALL 13 REDS GUILTY"-- a story about American Communists who faced prison for "conspiring to teach and advocate the duty and necessity of forcible overthrow of government."
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, especially in Latin America, "The Crucible" starts getting produced wherever a political coup appears imminent, or a dictatorial regime has just been over-thrown. From Argentina to Chile to Greece, Czechoslovakia, China, and a dozen other places, the play seems to present the same primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded in the brain of social man.


I am not sure what "The Crucible" is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something I'd not have dreamed of forty years ago. For others, it may simply be a fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play--the blind panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness. Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in Stalin's Russia, Pinochet's Chile, Mao's China, and other regimes. (Nien Cheng, the author of "Life and Death in Shang- hai," has told me that she could hardly believe that a non-Chinese--someone who had not experienced the Cultural Revolution--had written the play.) But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days. The film, by reaching the broad American audience as no play ever can, may well unearth still other connections to those buried public terrors that Salem first announced on this continent.


One thing more--something wonderful in the old sense of that word. I recall the weeks I spent reading testimony by the tome, commentaries, broadsides, confessions, and accusations. And always the crucial damning event was the signing of one's name in "the Devil's book." This Faustian agreement to hand over one's soul to the dreaded Lord of Darkness was the ultimate insult to God. But what were these new inductees supposed to have done once they'd signed on? Nobody seems even to have thought to ask. But, of course, actions are as irrelevant during cultural and religious wars as they are in nightmares. The thing at issue is buried intentions--the secret allegiances of the alienated hearts always the main threat to the theocratic mind, as well as its immemorial quarry.
 
1.      What about Communism scared McCarthy?
 
2.      What happened to Miller’s screenplay “The Hook”?
 
3.      Why has The Crucible been produced in countries experiencing political unrest?
 
4.      Discuss the meaning of Miller’s final sentence.

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The Crucible

Character Action/Motivation Chart

 

Directions: For each character listed below, record an action the character performed at some course during the play.  Include what motivated this character to do said action and what was the result. Also, find a quote from the play to support the action.

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character

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

John Proctor

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

Abigail Williams

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

Elizabeth Proctor

result

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

Rev. Hale

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

Danforth

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

Giles Corey

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

Mrs. Putnam

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

Reverend Parrish

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

Mary Warren

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

Francis Nurse

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

Thomas Putnam

action

motivation

result

supporting quote

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