If you are not engaged at the outset… the depth of research and knowledge is wasted upon you.
Is it fair to review the book, given what I've just said? I think so, because what you take away from a first reading is precisely what will determine whether there will ever be a second, third or dip-in-reference-reading to follow. To be fair, on a very first reading of the book, it may well be the only thing you take away, because there is a huge amount of detail to assimilate - and I will not pretend to have done so on my own first reading. If that is the only thing you take away from reading this remarkable book, then maybe it will have done its job.
The group headings alone seem to suggest that these near-hundred individuals are only the main players, and that many more could have been brought in to bear witness, were there but records left behind to do so.īefore we even get into the book, then, it's clear that this is a much further-reaching story than a mid-20th-century drama would have us believe. Her two or three line pen-portraits for each runs for nearly six pages, grouping them into "the parsonage", "other Salem villagers", "the core accusers", "some of the accused", "the Authorities", "among the Ministers" and "a few skeptics". Where Miller assembled a cast of about 20 characters, Shiff's dramatis personae (which she does list for reference at the beginning of the book) runs to 94. This is easy to do… because it is exactly what she does. To enjoy Schiff's interpretation of events, you need to take a step back and set aside whatever you think you know about Salem. Arthur Miller's play is rightly seen as an allegory of the McCarthyism in 1950s America – but having read Schiff's more academic approach to the source tale, it's easy to see that Miller's drama is much more about the hunting down of the 'red menace' than about what might have happened in New England two hundred and fifty years earlier. That particular lens was the very current witch-hunt that was going on at the time.
Like most people I know the story of Salem through the very particular lens of The Crucible.
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