^^^^^^^^^^THE CRUCIBLE: ACT II, SCENE 6Sure enough, Ezekiel Cheever, clerk of the Court, appears at the door, followed by Marshal Herrick. The trap has been sprung on Elizabeth. The poppet Mary Warren made out of boredom, to fill the long hours of sitting in court, and then gave to Elizabeth to make up for being so long away from home, is now the "hard proof" that Elizabeth is a witch. It's ludicrous that a doll would cause a woman to hang. What signifies a poppet?, everyone wants to know.NOTE: Dolls, teddy bears, and the like play a large part in the lives of most young children. You probably had one yourself, and remember playing games and having elaborate conversations with it. Puritan children were no different from other children in having dolls to play with. Poppets were not in themselves anything to worry about, or else how could Mary Warren make one in full view of the judges and the court?But in one respect a poppet was suspicious. A child could have a poppet, but a grownup keeping one was unnatural. Witches were widely believed to make images of their victims in order to torment them from a distance. The witch would stick a needle or thorn into the body of the image, and that part of the victim's body would be wracked with searing pain. Stick the needle in the image's heart, and the victim was supposed to die.Why would Abigail dare to do something as outrageous as this? Several answers are possible: 1) she's gone crazy and doesn't know what she's doing anymore; 2) she's drunk with the power she's acquired and is seeing how far she can go in leading grownups by the nose; 3) Elizabeth is right, "she'd dare not call out such a farmer's wife but there be monstrous profit in it. She thinks to take my place."Hale's position at this moment is critical. He's a figure of authority, not only as a judge, but as a specialist in witchcraft. If Abigail's trick gets past him, she's likely to get away with it, and Elizabeth Proctor will hang ...
