In some characters’ speech, there is a strong element of poetic form. For example, take a speech of Proctor’s during Act II.
‘I have gone tiptoe in this house this seven month since she (Abigail) is gone. I have not moved from here to there without I think to please you and still an everlasting funeral marches round your heart.’
Such poetic dialogue gives the reader an insight into Proctor’s character. It indicates that he is a man who thinks deeply, and is possibly more educated than some of the other characters.
There is a great deal of religious and biblical references found in The Crucible. As the Puritans took the Bible literally they probably would have quoted it frequently in their everyday speech. While trying to persuade John Proctor to save his life by confessing, Reverend Hale says, ‘I have gone these three months like our Lord into the wilderness’. He is comparing his experience to that of Jesus when, according to St Matthew, he was, ‘led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil’. When Elizabeth is speaking about Abigail in Act II, she says, ‘where she walks the crowd will part like the sea for Israel’, which is a reference to the parting of the Red Sea, when Moses led the Israelites in their escape from Egypt. In Act IV when Danforth is asked to delay the executions, he replies, ‘God have not empowered me like Joshua to stop the sun from rising’, which refers to Joshua, 10.
Such prominent references to the Bible provide a powerful, dignified way of speaking for the characters. This helps to create the impression of a different society, one which is isolated and deeply religious. It is a deliberate and simple language, which is appropriate to the period in which the play is set, without being too difficult for the modern audience. Within this form of language, some characters are made to be more expressive than others. For example, Abigail is a very articulate speaker, whereas Mary Warren is more subdued and timid.
The English spoken at the time of the events in Salem was strongly influenced by Latin. Most educated people would have used Latin for written communication and as a result, many important texts were only available in Latin. In Latin, the verb usually comes at the end of the sentence, for example, ‘Up the stairs she climbed.’ As a result of this unusual word order in The Crucible, modern readers may find it difficult to follow, as we have long since moved away from this form of sentence construction.
Miller uses double negative and inverted sentences structures in his adaptation of the language. For example, John Proctor says, ‘I never said no such thing’, and Giles Corey tells Danforth, ‘I will not give you no name’. In Act IV, Danforth tells Elizabeth ‘we come not for your life’, whereas nowadays we would say ‘we do not come for your life’; the same as ‘What think you, Mr Parris?’ would be said ‘What do you think?’ In his autobiography Timebends, Miller commented on his use of language in The Crucible:
I came to love its feel, like a hard burnished wood. Without planning to, I even elaborated a few of the grammatical forms myself, the double negatives especially, which occurred in the trial record much less frequently than they would in the play.
Apart from the obvious use of double negatives, some words are used in a way that we would not use them now. A prime example of this is when John Proctor expresses amazement that Hale would ‘suspicion’ his wife. Modern usage would be ‘suspect’. Another example is when complaining about his wife’s reading habits, Giles Corey says, ‘It discomforts me!’, using ‘discomfort’ as a verb, whereas we would say, ‘It makes me uncomfortable’.
Most characters in The Crucible use a lot of simile and metaphor. A simile is a figure of speech that expresses a resemblance between things of different kinds, whereas a metaphor is where an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity. Some examples of simile and metaphor used in The Crucible are, “There be no blush about my name", “A very augur bit will now be turned into your souls until your honesty is proved”, “My daughter and my niece I discovered dancing like heathen in the forest”, and “I know how you sweat like a stallion whenever I come near!”
