The Construction of a Period Dialect

Writers of historical fiction often 'periodize' their characters' speech. Some of them rely exclusively on previous models of archaicized language, while others embark on linguistic research themselves. Arthur Miller's period dialect in The Crucible (1953), his celebrated play about the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, is a prime example of this reconstructive approach to language. This study considers three sources which inspired Miller's remarkable seventeenth-century New England dialect in significant ways - William Shakespeare, the Salem Witchcraft Papers and Eugene O'Neill - and documents Miller's skills in exploiting the language found in these sources for his own artistic purposes. It also attempts to assess to what extent Miller's period idiom agrees with present-day linguistic evidence on Colonial American English.

Adrian Pablé is currently working as Maître Assistant in English linguistics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. He has published two books and several articles in the domains of dialectology, translation, sociolinguistics and literary linguistics.