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Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a tragic play set in 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, where Miller uses the Salem Trials as a metaphor for the 1950s McCarthy hearings. In Salem, people value their good names. The Puritan community acts as a theocracy in which there appears to be no right to privacy, and people must conform to a strict moral code. The theme of reputation, lying, and deceit are shown in Abigail, John Proctor, Elizabeth Proctor, Mary Warren, and other characters. In the play’s dialogue, Miller uses Biblical allusions, situational irony, and dramatic irony to develop these themes.

Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot?” This effectively puts the audience into a panic of a future under the British, luring them more into Henry’s ideas of war. The audience, already hyped from their boosted sense of independence since the beginning of the speech, is now completely vulnerable to Henry’s words.

Henry’s death in “The Red Convertible” is inevitable, but the question is, was his death a suicide or just a joke gone wrong? Louise Erdrich includes multiple ideas in her story that suggest Henry wanted to escape the misery he was facing. All signs point to Henry committing suicide through Erdrich’s use of foreshadowing, specific dialogue, and

Also the excessively violent actions of the characters shock the audience at times and works to show a bloody part of American history. Furthermore, the film feels as if you are thrown into history with wood constructed sets and men armed with clubs and knives. These elements work to enhance the thematic content of the play and the viewer’s intense experience of an untraditional period piece that relates a different version of American history, one darker and more anarchic. They sets, accents, and character actions all add to the authentic feel of the movie, which makes the film feel like it is a historical narrative, while also being interlinked with an individual story of vengeance that provides not only a historical account, but entertainment for the

When Arthur Miller published “The Crucible” in 1953, the play’s audience was a nation of Americans seized in the grip of McCarthyism. The Communist “witch hunt” has long since ended, but the public’s fascination with this shameful piece of American history has not. The original play unfolded over the course of 4 acts that mainly consisted of dialogue. As a result, the creators of the 1996 movie adaptation had an ample degree of creative latitude to update the narrative for a modern audience. Director Nicholas Hytner utilized a host of cinematic techniques that enabled the moving images to tug the heartstrings of the audience just as effectively as the book had done before. Given the temporal limitations of a film, several scenes were

“37 Who Saw Murder but Didn’t Call Police” (Gansburg), that was the title of a New York Times article talking about the horrific death of Kitty Genovese, a 28 year old bar manager living in Queens, who was raped and stabbed during a two hour window, from around 2:30 a.m. to the time ambulances arrived at 4:15, by Winston Moseley (Worthen). An estimated 37 people either heard or saw the events of that fateful night in 1964, but to Kitty’s demise, none had taken any sort of action(Gansburg). The murder of Kitty Genovese has sparked many psychologists to research and later create the term “Bystander Effect”, or “The Genovese Effect” (Merry).This Bystander Effect is also very prevalent in the play The Crucible, written by Arthur Miller less than a decade before the murder of Kitty Genovese. This paper will discuss Arthur Miller’s possible views on the Bystander Effect by connecting Mary Warren from The Crucible with the Kitty Genovese incident.

Henry demonstrated his use of Pathos by demonstrating how much of a threat Britain can pose for the U.S. He mentioned the “gentlemen” still lament for peace, but warns the audience to be vigilant by telling us “Our brethren are already in the field!” and “The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms!” Henry also bashes the people who were oblivious to the impending war by telling of how the British already taunted them of being weak and “unable to cope with so formidable an adversary”. Another Pathos acknowledgement

Patrick uses this to affect the feeling of the audience by presenting this evidence because he calls them “warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land.” The use of the words “cover” and “darken” connote an image of suffocation, death, and total imprisonment. Continuing, Mr. Henry stated, “They are meant for us; they can be meant for no other”(Henry) which emphasizes the military preparations which the British are taking while using a balanced sentence with parallel independent clauses which repeat that same point. He ends the paragraph with a metaphor comparing the build-up of armies and navies to “chains” which the British will “bind” and “rivet.” This creates an effect on pathos through the imagery of imprisonment created through the metaphor. In the next paragraph, Henry presents more opposing arguments with his refutation. The opposing arguments are asking the colonists to try and argue with the British with entreaty and humble supplication. Henry refutes these arguments by saying that they have already tried all of these strategies to no avail. Henry’s rhetorical pattern throughout these paragraphs is presenting the opposing arguments through rhetorical questions and then to respond to some of the rhetorical questions with

"Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come", Henry proclaims, illustrating for the audience that the issue is one that is changed. In Lines 28-33, Henry uses Imagery to help the audience to recognize being backed into a corner and having no other choice than to fight on an emotional level. Henry uses negatively charged diction in phrases, like ‘But When, ‘When will the time come’, and ‘the truth of the matter is’ to construct a plea or call to action through an activation of pathos in hearts of the audience Elsewhere in the argument rhetorical questions are used to emphasize the point that the colonists must fight the British, effectively saying the audience to feel patriotic through the memorisation of Henry’s arguments. Appeals to emotion, in combination with the effective use of rhetoric, activate pathos in the audience without crossing the ethical line between argument and

The year 1775 was a time of great division across the 13 Colonies. Some colonists wanted to engage in war against the British in the fight for freedom, while others decided that fighting was not worth the cause. Patrick Henry, famously known for his words, “give me liberty or give me death!” believed that fighting the British was the only chance at the 13 Colonies’ freedom. At the Virginia Convention, Henry proposed a resolution in order to prepare the local militia for battle.

Upon learning that the President was going to be at this play, Booth saw this as his opportunity to launch his assassination plot of eliminating the three most powerful men in the Government. Booth himself went after Lincoln, being the prominent actor that he was, John new that his way around the theatre and felt that he could reach Lincoln with any real difficulty. Around 9:30 pm, Booth snuck into the President’s box and stuck a derringer pistol behind Lincoln’s head and shot him. Booth then proceeded to draw out a large knife, with which he stabbed Major Rathbone when he tried to subdue him. Witness accounts in the New York Times, state that before Booth leapt from the Presidential box he shouted, “the South is avenged!’ and fell to the stage, upon landing, Booth shattered a portion of his left leg. As the audience began to understand what was going on Booth managed to stand and deliver his last line, “Sic Semper Tyrannis” (Thus always to tyrants), the Virginia state motto. John Wilkes then turned and stumbled to the back of the theater, where he managed to escape on his

2. Historical Context This play was created directly after the Mccarthyism era where many people were accused of being communist in America. “They viewed the McCarthy investigations as a shackling of freedom of thought through coercion, public pressure and fear of punishment”(Miller 3). The Mccarthyism era started

Imagine the year is 1692. In a small Massachusetts town a culture of highly religious folk live in peace. Salem. It´s late January and the reverendś young niece Abigail and only daughter begin to act strangely. Rumors of witchcraft fly through town and fear runs rampant.In around a year 200 people are unjustifiably accused and 20 sentenced to capital punishment. Who is next? The strange widow down the road? The Coreys? In a time of obscured justice, line were crossed and innocent lives lost. In his breakthrough play, The Crucible, Arthur Miller spins a tale not far from the truth.Letting his readers explore a gruesome tale of blind hatred. In Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Abigail Williams embodies the wrongdoings of the Salem Witch Trials.

Whilst the Greek and Roman predecessors of revenge tragedy showed little compunction in gruesome on-stage violence, the Elizabethan spectators were, by the time of publication and performance of Shakespearian plays, a more educated audience who would appreciate the poetic style and subtle references to classical literature. This is not to say that the sixteenth century public were sensitive to acts of startling brutality; public executions and bear baiting were frequent occurrences that no doubt permeated the psyche of a nation. It has been argued that Shakespeare, conscious of his contemporaries' efforts in this genre decided to `out-do his predecessors' but a far more probable explanation is that Shakespeare, accommodating the

Jonson, ever caustic, made no bones about his disdain for sensationalist tragedies that catered to the bloodlust of the ‘groundlings,’ yet even such an inveterate critic as he, was forced to admit that these melodramas had withstood the test of time. I would like to discuss two plays for this question – ‘Jeronimo’ or Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy performed in 1587 or 1588 and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, a play that appeared almost at the end of the period entitled ‘the golden age of revenge tragedy’