." Could there be some truth in this description? Now the woman herself is before us. Let's see what she's like.Her first words are, "What keeps you so late?" Maybe she's only worried that something happened to him. He wanted to finish seeding the farm, he replies, and this seems to satisfy her for the moment. But if she has more on her mind, his lateness will come up again.For the next few minutes John tries everything he can think of to get her to warm up toward him, but the only time she smiles is when he says the stew is well seasoned (and we know it wasn't). Finally, he has to know what's wrong: "I think you're sad again. Are you?" Sure enough, she's still bothered by his being late. The rest of the scene will bring out everything that makes this marriage so shaky.NOTE: The Abigail-Proctor-Elizabeth triangle is perhaps the most important subplot of the play, because it's these three people that we follow most closely through the next three acts. But the main story is the development of witch madness in Salem, and we cannot be allowed to forget it for long.Here we see Arthur Miller's ingenuity with "exposition," often the hardest thing a playwright has to do. He must tell us what's happened offstage or in the past, things we need to know in order to understand what happens onstage. Eight days have passed since the end of Act I, and somehow we need to know all that has happened in the meantime. But Miller can't be too obvious or clumsy. The worst kind of exposition is to have one character say to another, "As you know, the following things happened in the last eight days...." He might be able to make it a little less awkward by changing the line to, "Did you hear what happened in the last eight days?" but the audience will still recognize what he's doing and say, "Oh, here comes the exposition."What Miller does instead is get us thinking about something else entirely, in this case, what's wrong between John and Elizabeth Proctor. And...
