What happens at the end of The Crucible?

At the end of The Crucible, Deputy Governor Danforth forces John Proctor to sign his confession, which Proctor initially does and immediately regrets. Danforth then demands that Proctor hand him the confession so that he can publicly display Proctor's confession to the community of Salem. However, John refuses to hand over his confession and is aware that Salem's authority figures will use his name to support their corrupt court. Despite Reverend Hale's attempts to persuade him to not sacrifice his life, John Proctor courageously tears his confession in front of Danforth, Parris, and Hathorne. John Proctor ends up atoning for his past sins and finds redemption by tearing his confession. Before the play ends, Proctor prepares to become a martyr and walks towards the gallows to be hanged in the hope that the community will rise up against Salem's corrupt court.

Another note you might want to consider is this: In some of the different printings of The Crucible there is an explanation about Abigail, and there should be as she is a major character.

It portrays Abigail as skipping town and running away to Boston. Rumor has it that she boards a ship to get away.

Another important note is that as Elizabeth and John share their last words, the magistrates prepare to call her back in for a final set of questions. When she arrives they wonder why she can't get him to confess, and she responds, "He have his goodness now." This is one of the most crucial lines in the whole play as it portrays his redemption in the act of knowingly going to his death.

What happens to Reverend Hale at the end of The Crucible?

When Hale enters act 4, he is, according to the stage direction, "steeped in sorrow, exhausted, and more direct than he ever was." He has, evidently, realized that the accused witches are actually innocent of wrongdoing and that his support had enabled a corrupt court when the trials began. He tells Deputy Governor Danforth,

I come to do the Devil's work. I come to counsel Christians they should belie themselves. There is blood on my head! Can you not see the blood on my head!!

He feels a tremendous sense of guilt for the role that he played in the witch trials, and he feels responsible for the executions. Hale left the court back in the third act, but he has returned now in order to advise the convicted that it would be better for them to lie, confessing to a crime they did not commit, in order to save their own lives than to keep silent and die. Hale also feels some grief over this because he is a minister who is actually counseling the innocent to lie, which is also a sin, but, as he tells Elizabeth Proctor, "it may well be God damns a liar less than he that throws his life away for pride." He believes, or rather he hopes, that God would prefer to see an innocent person tell a lie in order to preserve his life than to proudly go to his grave, wasting his life. In the end, Hale is not able to convince any of the convicted who are scheduled to die with the sunrise. His grief and horror, we imagine, must be incalculable.

At the end of the play in Act IV, Reverend Hale is counseling the accused to lie and say they are witches in order to save themselves. This shows a change in Hale because at the beginning of the play, he believed that the accusations against the townspeople were true. Throughout the story, however, Hale begins to see that Abigail is a vicious girl who only wants revenge and to hurt others. He loses faith in the court system, which he once believed to be strongly centered on the Bible. He now knows that there is no possible way for the accused people to defend themselves against such lies and ignorance.

In The Crucible, how did the witch trials end?

I think that Miller shows the ending of the witch trials as being a result of public outrage.  Miller is able to convey that what happened in Andover and the very idea of public dissent against the trials and those who participated in it are part of where outrage lies is how the trials are shown to have come to an end.  This is significant for while Miller has shown Salem and communities to succumb to the very worst in human nature, the rebelling against the witch trials represents how human nature can be good in the midst of such challenges.  The ending of the trials is not through top down power, but rather power emerging from the bottom up.  Part of the reason why Parris is so discombobulated at the end of the drama is because he no longer enjoys the support of the public.  It is this particular element that helps to show the power of the populace rising up against elected or installed leadership when it senses that the will of the people is absent.  I think that this becomes where Miller is artful in being able to establish how the witch trials came to an end.