Tituba, Rev. Parris' slave from Barbados, enters the room, frightened and worried that Betty may die, but Parris makes her leave. Abigail Williams, the niece of Rev. Parris, also enters; she is a strikingly beautiful, seventeen year old orphan with a talent for deception. She brings with her Susanna Walcott, who tells Rev. Parris that Dr. Griggs can find no cure for Betty's ailment. Parris claims that he has sent for Reverend Hale of Beverly, who will confirm the possibility of an unnatural cause of Betty's illness, but he orders Susanna to say nothing of unnatural causes to others. Abigail warns Parris that there are rumors of witchcraft and that the parlor is packed with people, but Parris tells her that he cannot explain that he found his daughter and niece dancing like heathen in the forest. Abigail admits to dancing and is willing to accept the punishment, but will not admit to witchcraft.
Reverend Hale brings with him half a dozen heavy books. He introduces himself to Rebecca Nurse, who has heard of her great charity. Giles Corey tells Hale that Proctor does not believe in witches, but Proctor says he did not speak one way or another. When the men speak of the signs of witchcraft, Hale says that they cannot look to superstition, for the Devil is precise. Parris admits to the dancing and the conjuring, while Mrs. Putnam claims that witchcraft must be the cause of death for her seven children. Giles Corey asks Hale what the reading of strange books signifies. He says that he often awakes to find Martha reading in a corner and cannot say his prayers. Old Giles is the comical hero in Salem, who cares not for public opinion. Hale asks Abigail what happened in the forest. Parris claims he saw a kettle, but Abigail says it contained only soup, although a frog may have jumped in it. Parris asks whether they drank anything in it, and Hale asks Abigail if she has sold her soul to Lucifer. Finally Abigail blames Tituba, claiming that Tituba made her and Betty drink chicken blood. Abigail says that Tituba sends her spirit on her in church and makes her laugh at prayer. Putnam declares that Tituba must be hanged. Hale confronts Tituba. He says that if she loves these children she must let God's light shine on her. Hale asks if the Devil comes to her with anybody else. Tituba admits that the devil has come to her, and that the devil promises to return her to Barbados and shows how he has white people working for her, including Goody Good and Goody Osburn. Betty claims that she saw George Jacobs with the Devil, while Abigail claims she saw several others with the devil.
The character who sets the witchcraft trials in motion is Reverend John Hale. Hale is perhaps the most complex character in The Crucible, a man who approaches religious matters with the conviction of a scientist and a scientific emphasis on proper procedure. Hale holds the contradictory belief that they cannot rely on superstition to solve the girls' problems but that they may find a supernatural explanation for the events. Since he lacks the malicious motivations and obsessions that plague the other instigators of the trials, Reverend Hale has the ability to change his position, yet at this point he finds himself caught up in the hysteria he has helped to create
Among the characters in the play, it is Reverend Hale who demonstrates the most prominent character development. Reverend Hale is an expert on witchcraft, but his expertise comes from the books. They are heavy, weighted with authority. Without them, Reverend Hale would be no better than the others, a man with an opinion. If the others look to him for answers, he looks to the books. It is on the books' authority that the witches will later be hanged.
While the other characters remain fixed in their particular allegiances and beliefs, Hale demonstrates the debilitating effects of the witchcraft trials by the change in his character. Reverend Hale is thinking exactly like Danforth when, he tells Proctor in Act II: “Theology [literally, God's word], sir, is a fortress; no crack in a fortress may be accounted small. Even bending the law a little is dangerous business, especially at such a dangerous time as this.” When he reappears in the Act III he has none of the enthusiasm of before; although he clings to his belief in the absolute certainty of finding proof of witchery within Salem, Hale appears more tentative about the results. He demonstrates a strong feeling of guilt for his actions, as shown by his reliance on what he grasps as indisputable evidence; like Pontius Pilate, to whom Proctor compares Hale, he wants to play only a passive role in the proceedings without any feeling of personal responsibility. Hale's growing disillusionment foreshadows his later repudiation of the court's actions.
It's the spring of 1692. The whole village of Salem is in an uproar. The Reverend Samuel Parris' daughter Betty won't wake up, and the Putnams' little Ruth is walking around like a zombie. The night before, Reverend Parris had heard a funny noise in the woods outside his house, and stumbled onto a frightening scene: his black slave Tituba was waving her arms over a boiling kettle, muttering wild-sounding gibberish, and around the fire a dozen girls were dancing--dancing, strictly forbidden by Puritan law. Among the girls were Betty and Ruth and his niece Abigail Williams. When he jumped out on them, everyone screamed and ran, all except Betty, who fainted dead away. And now she won't wake up. The house is buzzing with people, and every other word is witchcraft. Reverend Parris doesn't want to believe it, but he's sent for an expert just in case--the Reverend John Hale a witchcraft expert from the neighboring village of Beverly. When Hale arrives the people in the room are all breathless, waiting for Mr. Hale and his books to work their magic. They all know that what takes place in the next few moments will probably change their lives. Even if he comes up with nothing, as he warns them might happen, and finds no bruise of hell on Betty, at least they will have witnessed a prodigious demonstration of deep learning. But Hale has given them reason to hope for something more spectacular. This man has acquaintance with all familiar spirits--your incubi and succubi; your witches that go by land, by air, and by sea; your wizards of the night and of the day. He has promised that if [Betty] is truly in the Devil's grip we may have to rip and tear to get her free. And as he is about to start, he warns them solemnly; “Now mark me, if the Devil is in her you will witness some frightful wonders in this room, so please keep your wits about you.” What Mr. Hale has in fact done is made it impossible for something not to happen.
He tries talking to Betty but she remains lifeless. He asks if someone afflicts her, or some thing--a pig, a mouse, or any beast at all. Nothing. He intones Latin over her: “In the name of the Father and the Son, I bid you [who are afflicting this child] return to Hell!” Nothing. He turns to Abigail. She squirms beneath his questions. Yes, they were dancing. Yes, there was a kettle of soup, but the live frog jumped in, we never put it in! Hale is on the scent now, and he bears down on her. Did you call the Devil last night? Abigail has to get out of this. I never called him! Tituba, Tituba... and we're off. Now Abigail can confess everything because Tituba made her do it: made her drink blood, made her laugh at prayer, made her dream corruptions and stand in the open doorway and not a stitch upon my body! What answer can poor Tituba make to such a deluge of accusations? No I didn't? Who's going to believe that? On the contrary, the witch has been found. Tituba's in a terrible jam. When she denies the charge that she compacted with the Devil, her master threatens to whip her to death, and Mr. Putnam adds that she must be hanged if she will not confess. Very well, she'll confess. But to Tituba, it may not have been such a lie. The Devil is real to these people. If they haven't seen him in the flesh, he is an active figure in their imaginations. He is the Author of all Temptations, the Father of Lies. And so, if a good Christian sins, it must be because, in some way, the Devil made him do it. The point here is that Hale and the others lead Tituba into her confession by giving her nowhere else to turn. And once she starts, the emotion of releasing pent-up guilt and anger is so powerful that it sucks Abigail and then Betty into its vortex. Witchcraft has been revealed.
Hale's questions are so sharp, and Tituba is so scared for her beloved Betty, that she blurts out that she was conjuring the dead. And when Hale presses her, she realizes her only way out is to confess. She gets carried away and begins to name others that she saw with the Devil. Soon Abigail is swept up in Tituba's ecstatic confession, and she too names names. Remember the atmosphere in the room, remember how frightened they all are. Tituba has just been released from a crushing burden of guilt. Abigail, too, has sinned, and she knows it. Whatever she does later, at this moment she may long fervently for the light of God and the sweet love of Jesus. However you interpret Abigail's confession, it does bring Betty back to life. Hale is jubilant: “Glory to God! It is broken, they are free!” As Putnam rushes out to summon the marshal, Hale shouts above the din, “Let the marshal bring irons! The madness has begun.”
Betty wakes up and joins them. In the next few days other girls--including Mary Warren--are added to their number, and within a week they have cried out (as they called it) 14 witches. An official court has been set up. Proctor confesses his lechery with Abigail; but when Elizabeth is brought in to corroborate the charge, she denies it, thinking to spare her husband's name. As Reverend Hale says, “it's a natural lie to tell.” Proctor is hauled off to jail.
Reverend Hale comes in on a curious errand: to put some questions as to the Christian character of this house, if you'll permit me. How changed he is from when we saw him last! Then he was bold and confident; now he seems tentative, almost shy. He is obviously troubled by the developments of the last few days. He, too, like Mary Warren, is an official of the court. But she is merely a witness. He is a judge. His signature is on Goody Osburn's death warrant. But he's a stranger to these people, and things are beginning to move too fast for him. Keep your eye on Hale. In a way he's our stand-in or proxy--we, too, are strangers in this town. His reactions will be much the same as ours would be if we were in his shoes. Hale loves the truth more than anything in the world. This love made him a scholar in the first place. It has also sharpened his sense of what's not true. And he's begun to feel uneasy about what's happening in Salem. It's just a feeling, and a vague one at that, but before he signs another death warrant he wants to know whom he's sending to the gallows.
Hale has a right to be worried about this softness in John Proctor's record. Worse yet, Proctor cannot recite the Ten Commandments. Remember Mary Warren telling us that Sarah Good couldn't do it either. And Sarah Good's been proved a witch, first by sending her spirit out in open court, later by confession. Proctor does a little better--he gets all but one, the seventh: Thou shalt not commit adultery. This is a serious failing, because the Puritans believed that all of God's laws are summarized in the Ten Commandments. Proctor then tells him what Abigail said, that the children's sickness had naught to do with witchcraft. Hale is shocked, and wants to know why Proctor has kept this information back. The answer Hale gets alarms him more than anything he's heard tonight. Proctor doubts the existence of witches, and Elizabeth agrees with him. Witchcraft is Hale's specialty and he knows that the first thing a witch will say is not, “I am no witch, but there's no such thing as a witch.” Notice two things in this passage. The first is the fact that some will swear to anything before they'll hang, and Hale knows Proctor's right in saying this. The second thing occurs when Proctor assures Hale that Elizabeth is incapable of lying.
Dolls, teddy bears, and the like play a large part in the lives of most young children. Poppets were not in themselves anything to worry about, but in one respect a poppet was suspicious. A child could have a poppet, but a grownup keeping one was unnatural. Witches were widely believed to make images of their victims in order to torment them from a distance. The witch would stick a needle or thorn into the body of the image, and that part of the victim's body would be wracked with searing pain. Stick the needle in the image's heart, and the victim was supposed to die.
Hale's struggle with his conscience:
Hale's position at this moment is critical. He's a figure of authority, not only as a judge, but as a specialist in witchcraft. If Abigail's trick gets past him, she's likely to get away with it, and Elizabeth Proctor will hang for being a witch. We know, as the Proctors know, what Abigail is up to. Whatever her motivation, she stuck that needle in her belly herself. But how do we know? First, by circumstantial evidence: we saw Mary Warren give the poppet to Elizabeth just moments before Hale arrived. Elizabeth hasn't left the room since then, so if she had stuck the needle in the poppet, we'd have seen her. More important, we know Abigail Williams--what kind of person she is, what she wants--and we believe she is capable of trying to frame Elizabeth.
Hale is in the dark on both these points. When he entered the Proctors' house for the first time in his life, that poppet was sitting on the mantelpiece and could have been there for years for all he knows. As far as he's concerned, Abigail Williams is what he sees every day in court: a young girl writhing in agony on the floor, suffering so hideously that it breaks his heart and fills him with rage against her tormentors. For all his learning and keen intelligence, the Reverend John Hale also has a tender heart, and it is this, if anything, that makes him falter now. It's hard for him to believe that women of such spotless reputation as Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey could be witches. It means, as he says, “that nothing's left to stop the whole green world from burning.” But he can't discount the possibility. He's seen too many wonders in court. And the alternative is appalling. To believe Proctor, is to charge a cold and cruel murder on Abigail. This is why, when Mary Warren tells him the real story of the poppet, he asks her, “May it be, perhaps, that someone conjures you even now to say this?” It's a reasonable question; he's seen it happen in court. Mary answers, “Why, no, sir, I am entirely myself, I think,” and adds that “Abby saw her make the poppet and stick the needle in.” This is troubling information, but Hale is too uncertain of himself among these strangers; he dare not leap to the conclusion that is so obvious to us. And so Hale, the intellectual with the soft heart, misses his chance to save the lives of innocent people. But maybe some of them are not so innocent. Before he leaves, Hale tells an enraged John Proctor: “...I cannot think God be provoked so grandly by such a petty cause.... Man, we must look to cause proportionate.”
Hale’s our proxy, he stands in for us in this play. You'll recall how much he changed in the week between Act I and Act II. Another week has passed; has Hale changed still further? In one way he is still the same. When anyone gets excited, Hale's the first one to try to calm things down. But now there's an added note of desperation in his pleas for peace, as if he's afraid he himself might be losing control. Notice what he's saying. In Act II he defended the court against the outrage of the farmers. Now he's defending the farmers against the sternness of the judges. He supports Giles Corey's outburst; he protests that “every defense is not an attack upon the court;” he tries to excuse Giles' silence by saying there is a prodigious fear of this court in the country; and he thinks Proctor's weighty claim should be argued by a lawyer. In all of these attempts he is brushed aside. Perhaps this explains his desperation: he sees this situation drifting toward disaster, and he is losing--or has already lost--his power to stop it.
Reverend Hale comes in to add his plea to Parris'. Things are uncertain enough; if the court falters the least bit now, there is real danger of losing control of the situation. But a confession will secure the courts position. He sends for Elizabeth Proctor. Maybe she can persuade her husband to confess. Once again, notice how Hale has changed. In Act III he was near the edge, but up until the very end he hung onto the belief that he was doing the right thing by helping the court. But when Proctor was condemned, it was the last straw. Now Hale has returned, but for what purpose? Why, it is all simple. “I come to do the Devil's work. I come to counsel Christians they should belie themselves. There is blood on my head! Can you not see the blood on my head!!” Hale has broken charity with a lot more than one person. And now he must break charity with God, by counseling them to lie in order to save their lives.
By October, 11 witches have gone to the gallows. On the morning John Proctor and seven others--including Rebecca Nurse--are to hang, strange rumors are going around. Other towns have risen up against their witch courts and overthrown them. Reverend Hale, who had believed John Proctor's story and had denounced the proceedings when Proctor was arrested, has now returned, and he's trying to get the prisoners to confess and save their lives, even if it means lying.
We see the depth of Hale's disillusionment and disgust with himself when he pleads with Elizabeth to get Proctor to confess: “Beware, Goody Proctor--cleave to no faith when faith brings blood.... Life, woman, life is God's most precious gift; no principle, however glorious, may justify the taking of it.” Hale, by now, is a lost soul. A minister of God, he is counseling people to lie. How can we have faith anymore in anything he says? Elizabeth senses this, and tells him, “I think that be the Devil's argument.”
Reverend John Hale (aged 56) was a graduate of Harvard College and the Pastor of the town of Beverly since 1665. When he was twelve he had gone to Boston to meet with Margaret Jones, a convicted witch who was to be executed. They asked her to confess and repent. She would not, but she impressed Hale with her claims of innocence. This early experience made him somewhat more cautious than others and even more likely to believe in a convicted witches innocence. In October 1692 someone accused his wife of witchcraft and where Hale had been rather forward in the prosecution of the supposed witches he now came to believe that spectral evidence was not enough to convict on. He then began to argue against the trials.
The effects of Hale’s character and action helped progressed the play and spark off the witch trials. By his arrogance in the beginning of Act 1 where “he feels the pride of the specialists whose unique knowledge has at last been publicly called for. This also goes to show that Hale has one of the tragic hero’s flaws, which is arrogance. Hale does try to redeem himself by changing his view about witchcraft. Hale tried to save John Proctor’s life giving him advice and reasoning him, but to avail. Proctor was hung. Hale became the audience’s voice in the end saying the witch trials were wrong.
