Test Your Understanding

In Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, a play about the Salem Witch trials, the first several people accused of practicing witchcraft were people like Old Meg, but the people of Salem exhibited few signs of sympathy for them unlike the people of Gloucester. An article in Smithsonian magazine from April 1992 provides descriptions of four accused women. All were executed.

• Sarah Good: “Penniless, broken, she smoked a pipe and begged from house to house. If anyone refused her, the craggy old witch went away muttering, and it wasn’t long before trouble darkened the door. A cow died for no reason. A child screamed as if pinched. Fever came.”
• Bridge Bishop: “Three husbands she’d had, and still she strode around the village in that bright red bodice. She owned an inn and ‘entertained’ travelers and young people, drinking and playing games, ‘whereby discord did arise in other families, and young people were in danger to be corrupted.’”
• Sarah Osborne: “Hadn’t been to church in months and was said to be living in sin.”
• Martha Corey: “laughed derisively at the very idea of witchcraft.”

As the hysteria grew, more and more respectable people were arrested for practicing witchcraft. Some of the accusers were settling grudges or were after the land the accused owned. Twenty innocent people were hanged or tortured to death.