His house stood in the “town” -but we today would hardly call it a village. He regarded them as young adults, and until this strange crisis he, like the rest of Salem, never conceived that the children were anything but thankful for being permitted to walk straight, eyes slightly lowered, arms at the sides, and mouths shut until bidden to speak. He was a widower with no interest in children, or talent with them. In meeting, he felt insulted if someone rose to shut the door without first asking his permission. He believed he was being persecuted wherever he went, despite his best efforts to win people and God to his side. In history he cut a villainous path, and there is very little good to be said for him. At the time of these events Parris was in his middle forties. His daughter, Betty Parris, aged ten, is lying on the bed, inert. As the curtain rises, Reverend Parris is discovered kneeling be-side the bed, evidently in prayer. The roof rafters are exposed, and the wood colors are raw and unmellowed. The room gives op an air of clean spareness. At the back a door opens on the landing of the stairway to the ground floor. A chest, a chair, and a small table are the other furnishings. A candle still burns near the bed, which is at the right. Through its leaded panes the morning sunlight streams. They may therefore be taken as creations of my own, drawn to the best of my ability in conformity with their known behavior, except as indicated in the commentary I have written for this text.ĪCT ONE (AN OVERTURE) A small upper bedroom in the home of Reverend Samuel Parris, Salem, Massachusetts, in the spring of the year 1692. As for the characters of the persons, little is known about most of them excepting what may be surmised from a few letters, the trial record, certain broadsides written at the time, and references to their conduct in sources of varying reliability. The fate of each character is exactly that of his historical model, and there is no one in the drama who did not play a similar -and in some cases exactly the same -role in history.
However, I believe that the reader will discover here the essential nature of one of the strangest and most awful chapters in human history. Dramatic purposes have sometimes required many characters to be fused into one the number of girls involved in the “crying-out” has been reduced Abigail’s age has been raised while there were several judges of almost equal authority, I have symbolized them all in Hathorne and Danforth. A NOTE ON THE HISTORICAL ACCURACY OF THIS PLAY This play is not history in the sense in which the word is used by the academic historian.
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