Act summaries, critical commentary, textual notes and revision questions

Abstract

Early one sunny spring morning in 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, Betty, the ten-year-old daughter of the widower Reverend Samuel Parris is lying motionless in a trance-like sleep. Apparently she and some other local girls have been encouraging Parris’s Barbadian servant Tituba to raise spells, and Parris surprised them while they were dancing in the forest: some of them may have been naked. All of them, certainly, are likely to be severely punished if and when the truth emerges. One of these girls is Parris’s niece, Abigail Williams, who will admit only to the dancing: but she reports a rumour of witchcraft, and some townsfolk have called upon their priest — are in fact meeting there and then downstairs in their concern: Parris, who has made many enemies for various reasons during his ministry, is pathetically clutching at straws trying to convince himself that no such terrible evil as witchcraft has entered and befallen his house.