In my reading of, and dealing with Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, I found that it is concerned with truth, or different forms of truth. As the plural suggests, these are not absolute or objective truths, let alone universal ones, nor is there one ‘deep’ truth in the play, in a basic hermeneutical sense, as if the play captured the deeper truth of McCarthyism. The play provokes a specific historically, culturally and politically charged truth-practice that is not so much revealed through theatre as it is made possible, aesthetically and politically, by theatre. As such, the play does not so much embody the classical nineteenth-century ‘true mirror’ that is held up to society. This is to say: it does not reflect truth. It is through theatrical enactment and dramatization that truths can be established, which is something altogether different. There is an intriguing passage, in this context, in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition in which she...
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In my reading of, and dealing with Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, I found that it is concerned with truth, or different forms of truth. As the plural suggests, these are not absolute or objective truths, let alone universal ones, nor is there one ‘deep’ truth in the play, in a basic hermeneutical sense, as if the play captured the deeper truth of McCarthyism. The play provokes a specific historically, culturally and politically charged truth-practice that is not so much revealed through theatre as it is made possible, aesthetically and politically, by theatre. As such, the play does not so much embody the classical nineteenth-century ‘true mirror’ that is held up to society. This is to say: it does not reflect truth. It is through theatrical enactment and dramatization that truths can be established, which is something altogether different. There is an intriguing passage, in this context, in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition in which she states that theatre is ‘the political art par excellence, for only there is the political sphere of human life transposed into art’. Why this may be so is a question that this thesis seeks to answer.
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