Reverend Samuel Parris (The Crucible)

Reverend Samuel Parris is an antagonist in Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The play is partially inspired from the Salem Witch trials of 1692, and was used as an allegory for the Red Scare that happened during the Cold War in the 1960s.

In The Crucible
Parris was the corrupt reverend who reigned over the Puritan church. He was very greedy and self-absorbent, and as a result he was despised by all the inhabitants of Salem. He would force people to give him worldly possessions or else they would burn in Hell, and referred to everyone as his enemies that sought to destroy him. Before the play began, he witnessed his daughter Betty and his niece Abigail dancing in front of a bonfire with his servant Tituba who was leading them in a Barbados chant. Suddenly, Betty fell to the ground unconscious and Parris ran over. However, he was more concerned that his role as a reverend would be jeopardized if he confessed to there being witchcraft in his house than the fact that his own daughter is unresponsive. He later calls Reverend Hale to diagnose his daughter. As a result of him hiring Hale to check his daughter for any ailments, Parris started a ripple effect which would eventually lead to more people being accused.

In Act III, Parris began to take part in the trials, and cheered when John Proctor was found guilty of being the Devil's man. However, in Act III, Reverend Parris began to experience slight character development once the trials started to reach its peak. He realizes that those people accused of witchcraft were most likely innocent of all charges and teamed up with Hale as an attempt to get people to "confess" in order to save their lives. It should also be noted that Abigail herself disappeared alongside her associate Mercy and that she also borded a ship and robbed Parris of all his earnings.

Parris desperately attempted to get John Proctor to lie about being a witch as a means to spare him his execution. John decides to keep his life, but later wishes to hang once he realized that his name would be written on a document which would then be posted to the door of the church. At the end of the play, Proctor is hung, and Parris leaves Salem, failing to save anyone.