The Crucible

Hale is considered a venerable man by the people of Salem when he arrives to help them find their witches. He is a specialist in discovering who is heathenish in a village. Salem has many sumptuary laws in place to keep away witches, but they haven’t worked as planned. In order to save his wife from being executed for witchcraft, Proctor is forced to reveal his own sin and live in ignominy. Rather than using a guillotine to kill the condemned people, they use a noose. Danforth, who is a judge and a man of eminence, decides who will hang and who is innocent, but the horrified visages of the girls influence him when they say they see a witch.

Abigail is the leader of these girls, but though she seems to have some sagacity she is really capable of some lurid things. While Tituba played with the girls and showed them the power of alchemy, Abigail imbibed blood and wished for the death of Elizabeth Proctor, the women who threw her out after she became John Proctor’s paramour. When Elizabeth besmirches Abigail in town, the girl begins to concoct a plan to have her killed.

Abigail is gifted with ingenuity. When she sees the opportunity to keep her and her friends from getting in trouble for dancing in the woods, she decides that they can used their dexterity to make themselves faint. Betty and Ruth even fake a somniferous infirmity to make it more convincing. Ruth’s parents speak of her somnambulism too as they explain her sickness to Paris.

Many of the townspeople believe that there is something diabolical about the girls’ ailments and their game begins to have inimical effects. The accused women start proffering others’ names in order to save themselves. The calamity starts reaching its zenith as children are being orphaned and cows are abandoned on farms. Though the court originally believed it was unerring, they begin to comport more desperately to regain the townspeople’s faith after losing it for being so scurrilous to the accused.