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Historical accuracy

In creating a work for the stage Miller made no attempt to represent the real, historical personalities of his characters: he developed them to meet the needs of the play. Indeed, in most cases the surviving records give no indication upon which he could draw. He fused certain characters into one: for example the judges "Hathorne" and "Danforth" are representative of several judges in the case, and the number of young girls involved was similarly reduced. Abigail's age was increased to allow the plot device of the relationship with Proctor. Most of the historical roles, however, are accurately represented and the judicial sentences pronounced on the characters are as given to the real-life counterparts.^[8]

The action of the play takes place only seventy years after the community arrived as settlers from Britain, and the characters would have had retained strong regional dialects from the home country. Miller ignored this, giving all his characters the same colloquialisms, such as "Goody" for good wife, and drawing on the rhythms and speech patterns of the King James Bible to achieve the effect of historical perspective he wanted.^[1]