"[The] whole country's talkin' witchcraft!- proclaims a young girl by the name of Mary Warren to a group of her friends concerning heathen rituals they were performing in the forest near their strict, Puritan village in Arthur Miller's dramatic play, The Crucible. The girls, led in their conjuring by a black slave from Barbados, were discovered by the minister of the town of Salem, Massachusetts in the spring of 1692. The minister, Reverend Samuel Parris, immediately contacted Reverend John Hale of Beverly who was an expert at discovering the Devil in his many disguises to investigate the possibility of witches in Salem. In the course of the play Rev. Hale undergoes a transformation from a nave, ignorant persecutor into an enlightened sensible .
Rev. Hale's ignorance is first evident within his very first line of dialogue. When his carriage first arrives in Salem Rev. Hale hands some books to Parris who comments that they are heavy. Hale replies, "They must be; they are weighted with authority- (pp. 36). Through this quote he alludes to the fact that he trusts the general opinions of those books more than his common sense or intuition purely because of the subject matter of the books. He also shows his ignorance when talking to John Proctor about the witch epidemic that is running through the town. "Nonsense! Mister, I have myself examined Tituba, Sarah Good, and numerous others that have confessed to dealing with the Devil. They have confessed it- (pp.68). John Proctor replies that they only confess because they will hang if they deny it. Rev. Hale displays his ignorance in this conversation by resisting to agree with Proctor. He hears one of the most sensible remarks of the whole play but continues on in his persecution of the innocent victims of girlish pretense. Hales' ignorance leads to the conviction of at least seventy-two accused witches, which could have been spared the hardships of prison if he had not overlooked these details.
