In Henry Miller’s play The Crucible, the small Massachusetts community of Salem falls into ruin as it hunts and kills suspected witches. The spark that lit the fire and set the villagers against one another is mass accusations and cover-ups all in an effort to protect reputations. In the opening act, Reverend Parris wrings his hands over his daughter who is bedridden and seemingly touched by some evil force. The night before Parris caught his daughter and other girls dancing in the forest. Parris wants to protect his good family name, yet with full understanding of the laws of their community, a theocracy, you are either good or you are evil. Abigail, one of the girls caught dancing, soon arrives on the scene and is questioned.
Parris’ questions to Abigail are leading and they exemplify Parris’ character, a man who only understands black and white, and who counts reputation as thing to be guarded at all costs. For example, when Parris asks Abigail, “Your name in the town—it is entirely white, is it not?” His question is leading, confrontational, and suggestive, but most importantly it illuminates his character. Using the term “white” as an example of the expectation of perfection within any member who wishes to remain in the community, and as an example of his own fears, that his name will be seen as anything other than white. Her is projecting and he is demonstrating a core theme in The Crucible, that reputation is paramount, with a good name, one is ruined.
When Abigail is confronted, she panics for she knows that shame and disgrace will follow if it comes out that the girls were, in fact, practicing witchcraft. She receives the suggestive remarks from Parris and sees them as threats and in a desire to retain her “white” name, she starts naming names, starting with the slave, Tituba, who was with them. When Abigail witnesses Tituba’s method of self-preservation, confession, she takes the same route. Even though Abigail learns this tactic from Tituba, she knows the true source of deceit, is the community and its institution of maintaining ones reputation. Abigail comments that she “never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew what lying lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men!” She is expresses her character traits of deceit, adultery, coveting, and maliciousness. She is also exposing the theme of intolerance, as the entire community is entrenched in a religious structure that does not yield and aims to destroy those who cannot maintain their “white” names.
In William Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, is the telling a Scottish general’s decent into a moral black hole as his ambition unravel, grows, and binds itself around his neck and all those around him. In the opening act, Macbeth is returning from battle when he comes across a coven of three witches. The witches proceed to tell Macbeth his fortune, or so he believes. He suspects something wicked is afoot; he cannot contain his dread or his excitement at the possibilities. When Macbeth finds that at least part of what they say is true he speaks, in an aside, saying that, “Present fears/Are less than horrible imaginings:/My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical . . . and nothing is/But what is not.” Macbeth is expressing his own character, that of an essentially good man who falls to temptation and a bottomless well of ambition. He knows enough to be horrified by the prospects of his own imaginings, but he cannot help himself in having them. He is a character who is easily manipulated. The witches mislead him, and his wife continually degrades and bullies him into even darker depths of ruthlessness. This quote also points to the plays main theme of ambition as a slip and slide of ultimate destruction.
When Lady Macbeth is made aware via letter of her husband’s assent to Thane of Cawdor, it is as if a she holds an unholy scroll meant to release all the wickedness in her heart. She immediately assumes him to be too kind for the necessary ruthless spirit to take on the duties of the endlessly ambitious. She says that even though she knows that he is “not without ambition,” she immediately follows that up with the caveat, “but without/The illness should attend it.” He will not readily and comfortably settle into the throne of blood, as it were. This quote highlights Lady Macbeth’s character as that of a manipulative wife whose ambition is unquenchable. She can respect her husband enough for what ambition he has, but she suggests that he is wanting in the gumption that she expects of him. She has that gumption. The quote also points to the theme of morality being swallowed by ambition. Untethered ambition, she acknowledges, becomes or demands a sort of “illness.”
The opening acts of The Crucible and Macbeth both foreshadow the darkness that lay ahead for the characters. Their beginnings express the characters wants, needs and fear—the essential ingredients to their actions throughout the continuation of the play. The opening acts set up the themes to be examined and repeated over the course of the play, making the meanings resonate from the initial set-up.
