1952
Summer: at Buckow, east of Berlin, Brecht starts planning a production of Coriolanus and discusses Eisler’s project for a Faust opera.
1953
Spring: Stalin dies, aged 73. A ‘Stanislavsky conference’ in the East German Academy, to promote Socialist Realism in the theatre, is followed by meetings to discredit Eisler’s libretto for the Faust opera. June: quickly suppressed rising against the East German government in Berlin and elsewhere. Brecht at Buckow notes that ‘the whole of existence has been alienated’ for him by this. Khrushchev becomes Stalin’s successor.
1954
January: Brecht becomes an adviser to the new East German Ministry of Culture. March: the Ensemble at last gets its own theatre on the Schiffbauerdamm. July: its production of Mother Courage staged in Paris. December: Brecht awarded a Stalin Peace Prize by the USSR.
1955
August: shooting at last begins on Mother Courage film, but is broken off after ten days and the project abandoned. Brecht in poor health.
1956
Khrushchev denounces Stalin’s dictatorial methods and abuses of power to the Twentieth Party Congress in Moscow. A copy of his speech reaches Brecht. May: Brecht in the Charité hospital to shake off influenza. August 14: he dies in the Charité of a heart infarct.
1957
The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Visions of Simone Machara and Schweyk in the Second World War produced for the first time in Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Warsaw respectively.
Life of Galileo
Play
Collaborator: M. STEFFIN
Translator: JOHN WILLETT
Characters
GALILEO GALILEI
ANDREA SARTI
MRS SARTI, Galileo’s housekeeper, Andrea’s mother
LUDOVICO MARSILI, a rich young man
THE PROCURATOR OF PADUA UNIVERSITY, Mr Priuli
SAGREDO, Galileo’s friend
VIRGINIA, Galileo’s daughter
FEDERZONI, a lens-grinder, Galileo’s assistant
THE DOGE
SENATORS
COSIMO DE MEDICI, Grand Duke of Florence
THE COURT CHAMBERLAIN
THE THEOLOGIAN
THE PHILOSOPHER
THE MATHEMATICIAN
THE OLDER COURT LADY
THE YOUNGER COURT LADY
GRAND-DUCAL FOOTMAN
TWO NUNS
TWO SOLDIERS
THE OLD WOMAN
A FAT PRELATE
TWO SCHOLARS
TWO MONKS
TWO ASTRONOMERS
A VERY THIN MONK
THE VERY OLD CARDINAL
FATHER CHRISTOPHER CLAVIUS, astonomer
THE LITTLE MONK
THE CARDINAL INQUISITOR
CARDINAL BARBERINI, subsequently Pope Urban VIII
CARDINAL BELLARMIN
TWO CLERICAL SECRETARIES
TWO YOUNG LADIES
FILIPPO MUCIUS, a scholar
MR GAFFONE, Rector of the University of Pisa
THE BALLAD-SINGER
HIS WIFE
VANNI, an ironfounder
AN OFFICIAL
A HIGH OFFICIAL
AN INDIVIDUAL
A MONK
A PEASANT
A FRONTIER GUARD
A CLERK
Men, women, children
1
Galileo Galilei, a teacher of mathematics at Padua, sets out to prove Copernicus’s new cosmogony
In the year sixteen hundred and nine
Science’s light began to shine.
At Padua city in a modest house
Galileo Galilei set out to prove
The sun is still, the earth is on the move.
Galileo’s rather wretched study in Padua. It is morning. A boy, Andrea, the housekeeper’s son, brings in a glass of milk and a roll.
GALILEO washing down to the waist, puffing and cheerful: Put that milk on the table, and don’t you shut any of those books.
ANDREA: Mother says we must pay the milkman. Or he’ll start making a circle round our house, Mr Galilei.
GALILEO: Describing a circle, you mean, Andrea.
ANDREA: Whichever you like. If we don’t pay the bill he’ll start describing a circle round us, Mr Galilei.
GALILEO: Whereas when Mr Cambione the bailiff comes straight for us what sort of distance between two points is he going to pick?
ANDREA grinning: The shortest.
GALILEO: Right. I’ve got something for you. Look behind the star charts.
Andrea rummages behind the star charts and brings out a big wooden model of the Ptolemaic system.
ANDREA: What is it?
GALILEO: That’s an armillary sphere. It’s a contraption to show how the planets move around the earth, according to our forefathers.
ANDREA: How?
GALILEO: Let’s examine it. Start at the beginning. Description?
ANDREA: In the middle there’s a small stone.
GALILEO: That’s the earth.
ANDREA: Round it there are rings, one inside another.
GALILEO: How many?
ANDREA: Eight.
GALILEO: That’s the crystal spheres.
ANDREA: Stuck to the rings are little balls.
GALILEO: The stars.
ANDREA: Then there are bands with words painted on them.
GALILEO: What sort of words?
ANDREA: Names of stars.
GALILEO: Such as …
ANDREA: The lowest ball is the moon, it says. Above that’s the sun.
GALILEO: Now start the sun moving.
ANDREA moves the rings: That’s great. But we’re so shut in.
GALILEO drying himself: Yes, I felt that first time I saw one of those. We’re not the only ones to feel it. He tosses the towel to Andrea, for him to dry his back with. Walls and spheres and immobility! For two thousand years people have believed that the sun and all the stars of heaven rotate around mankind. Pope, cardinals, princes, professors, captains, merchants, fishwives and schoolkids thought they were sitting motionless inside this crystal sphere. But now we are breaking out of it, Andrea, at full speed. Because the old days are over and this is a new time. For the last hundred years mankind has seemed to be expecting something.
Our cities are cramped, and so are men’s minds. Superstition and the plague. But now the word is ‘that’s how things are, but they won’t stay like that’. Because everything is in motion, my friend.
I like to think that it began with the ships. As far as men could remember they had always hugged the coast, then suddenly they abandoned the coast line and ventured out across the seas. On our old continent a rumour sprang up: there might be new ones. And since our ships began sailing to them the laughing continents have got the message: the great ocean they feared, is a little puddle. And a vast desire has sprung up to know the reasons for everything: why a stone falls when you let it go and why it rises when you toss it up. Each day something fresh is discovered. Men of a hundred, even, are getting the young people to bawl the latest example into their ear. There have been a lot of discoveries, but there is still plenty to be found out. So future generations should have enough to do.
As a young man in Siena I watched a group of building workers argue for five minutes, then abandon a thousand-year-old method of shifting granite blocks in favour of a new and more efficient arrangement of the ropes. Then and there I knew, the old days are over and this is a new time. Soon humanity is going to understand its abode, the heavenly body on which it dwells. What is written in the old books is no longer good enough. For where faith has been enthroned for a thousand years doubt now sits. Everyone says: right, that’s what it says in the books, but let’s have a look for ourselves. The most solemn truths are being familiarly nudged; what was never doubted before is doubted now.
This has created a draught which is blowing up the gold-embroidered skirts of the prelates and princes, revealing the fat and skinny legs underneath, legs like our own. The heaven
s, it turns out, are empty. Cheerful laughter is our response. But the waters of the earth drive the new spinning machines, while in the shipyards, the ropewalks and sail-lofts five hundred hands are moving together in a new system.
It is my prophecy that our own lifetime will see astronomy being discussed in the marketplaces. Even the fishwives’ sons will hasten off to school. For these novelty-seeking people in our cities will be delighted with a new astronomy that sets the earth moving too. The old idea was always that the stars were fixed to a crystal vault to stop them falling down. Today we have found the courage to let them soar through space without support; and they are travelling at full speed just like our ships, at full speed and without support.
And the earth is rolling cheerfully around the sun, and the fishwives, merchants, princes, cardinals and even the Pope are rolling with it.
The universe has lost its centre overnight, and woken up to find it has countless centres. So that each one can now be seen as the centre, or none at all. Suddenly there is a lot of room.
Our ships sail far overseas, our planets move far out into space, in chess too the rooks have begun sweeping far across the board.
What does the poet say? O early morning of beginnings …
ANDREA:
O early morning of beginnings
O breath of wind that
Cometh from new shores!
And you’d better drink up your milk, because people are sure to start arriving soon.
GALILEO: Have you understood what I told you yesterday?
ANDREA: What? All about Copper Knickers and turning?
GALILEO: Yes.
ANDREA: No. What d’you want me to understand that for? It’s very difficult, and I’m not even eleven till October.
GALILEO: I particularly want you to understand it. Getting people to understand it is the reason why I go on working and buying expensive books instead of paying the milkman.
ANDREA: But I can see with my own eyes that the sun goes down in a different place from where it rises. So how can it stay still? Of course it can’t.
GALILEO: You can see, indeed! What can you see? Nothing at all. You just gawp. Gawping isn’t seeing. He puts the iron washstand in the middle of the room. Right: this is the sun. Sit down. Andrea sits on one of the chairs, Galileo stands behind him. Where’s the sun, right or left of you?
ANDREA: Left.
GALILEO: And how does it get to be on your right?
ANDREA: By you carrying it to my right, of course.
GALILEO: Isn’t there any other way? He picks him up along with the chair and makes an about-turn. Now where’s the sun?
ANDREA: On my right.
GALILEO: Did it move?
ANDREA: Not really.
GALILEO: So what did move?
ANDREA: Me.
GALILEO bellows: Wrong! You idiot! The chair!
ANDREA: But me with it!
GALILEO: Of course. The chair’s the earth. You’re sitting on it.
MRS SARTI has entered in order to make the bed. She has been watching: Just what are you up to with my boy, Mr Galilei?
GALILEO: Teaching him to see, Mrs Sarti.
MRS SARTI: What, by lugging him round the room?
ANDREA: Lay off, mother. You don’t understand.
MRS SARTI: Oh, don’t I? And you do: is that it? There’s a young gentleman wants some lessons. Very well dressed, got a letter of introduction too. Hands it over. You’ll have Andrea believing two and two makes five any minute now, Mr Galilei. As if he didn’t already muddle up everything you tell him. Only last night he was arguing that the earth goes round the sun. He’s got it into his head that some gentleman called Copper Knickers worked that one out.
ANDREA: Didn’t Copper Knickers work it out, Mr Galilei? You tell her.
MRS SARTI: You surely can’t tell him such stories? Making him trot it all out at school so the priests come and see me because he keeps on coming out with blasphemies. You should be ashamed of yourself, Mr Galilei.
GALILEO eating his breakfast: In consequence of our researches, Mrs Sarti, and as a result of intensive arguments, Andrea and I have made discoveries which we can no longer hold back from the world. A new time has begun, a time it’s a pleasure to live in.
MRS SARTI: Well. Let’s hope your new time will allow us to pay the milkman, Mr Galilei. Indicating the letter of introduction. Just do me a favour and don’t send this man away. I’m thinking of the milk bill.
GALILEO laughing: Let me at least finish my milk! To Andrea: So you did understand something yesterday?
ANDREA: I only told her to wake her up a bit. But it isn’t true. All you did with me and that chair was turn it sideways, not like this. He makes a looping motion with his arm. Or I’d have fallen off, and that’s a fact. Why didn’t you turn the chair over? Because it would have proved I’d fall off if you turned it that way. So there.
GALILEO: Look, I proved to you …
ANDREA: But last night I realised that if the earth turned that way I’d be hanging head downwards every night, and that’s a fact.
GALILEO takes an apple from the table: Right, now this is the earth.
ANDREA: Don’t keep on taking that sort of example, Mr Galilei. They always work.
GALILEO putting back the apple: Very well.
ANDREA: Examples always work if you’re clever. Only I can’t lug my mother round in a chair like you did me. So you see it’s a rotten example really. And suppose your apple is the earth like you say? Nothing follows.
GALILEO laughing: You just don’t want to know.
ANDREA: Pick it up again. Why don’t I hang head downwards at night, then?
GALILEO: Right: here’s the earth and here’s you standing on it. He takes a splinter from a piece of firewood and sticks it into the apple. Now the earth’s turning round.
ANDREA: And now I’m hanging head downwards.
GALILEO: What d’you mean? Look at it carefully. Where’s your head?
ANDREA pointing: There. Underneath.
GALILEO: Really? He turns it back: Isn’t it in precisely the same position? Aren’t your feet still underneath? You don’t stand like this when I turn it, do you? He takes out the splinter and puts it in upside down.
ANDREA: No. Then why don’t I notice it’s turning?
GALILEO: Because you’re turning with it. You and the air above you and everything else on this ball.
ANDREA: Then why does it look as if the sun’s moving?
GALILEO turns the apple and the splinter round again: Right: you’re seeing the earth below you; that doesn’t change, it’s always underneath you and so far as you’re concerned it doesn’t move. But then look what’s above you. At present the lamp’s over your head, but once I’ve turned the apple what’s over it now; what’s above?
ANDREA turns his head similarly: The stove.
GALILEO: And where’s the lamp?
ANDREA: Underneath.
GALILEO: Ha.
ANDREA: That’s great: that’ll give her something to think about. Enter Ludovico Marsili, a rich young man.
GALILEO: This place is getting like a pigeon loft.
LUDOVICO: Good morning, sir. My name is Ludovico Marsili.
GALILEO reading his letter of introduction: So you’ve been in Holland?
LUDOVICO: Where they were all speaking about you, Mr Galilei.
GALILEO: Your family owns estates in the Campagna?
LUDOVICO: Mother wanted me to have a look-see, find out what’s cooking in the world and all that.
GALILEO: And in Holland they told you that in Italy, for instance, I was cooking?
LUDOVICO: And since Mother also wanted me to have a look-see in the sciences …
GALILEO: Private tuition: ten scudi a month.
LUDOVICO: Very well, sir.
GALILEO: What are your main interests?
LUDOVICO: Horses.
GALILEO: Ha.
LUDOVICO: I’ve not got the brains for science, Mr Galilei.
GALILEO: Ha. In that case we’ll make it fifteen scudi a month.
LUDOVICO: Very well, Mr Galilei.
GALILEO: I’ll have to take you first thing in the morning. That’ll be your loss, Andrea. You’ll have to drop out of course. You don’t pay, see?
ANDREA: I’m off. Can I have the apple?
GALILEO: Yes.
Exit Andrea.
LUDOVICO: You’ll have to be patient with me. You see, everything in the sciences goes against a fellow’s good sound commonsense. I mean, look at that queer tube thing they’re selling in Amsterdam. I gave it a good looking-over. A green leather casing and a couple of lenses, one this way – he indicates a concave lens – and the other that way – he indicates a convex lens. One of them’s supposed to magnify and the other reduces. Anyone in his right mind would expect them to cancel out. They don’t. The thing makes everything appear five times the size. That’s science for you.
GALILEO: What appears five times the size?
LUDOVICO: Church spires, pigeons, anything that’s a long way off.
GALILEO: Did you yourself see church spires magnified in this way?
LUDOVICO: Yes, sir.
GALILEO: And this tube has two lenses? He makes a sketch on a piece of paper. Did it look like that? Ludovico nods. How old’s this invention?
LUDOVICO: Not more than a couple of days, I’d say, when I left Holland; at least that’s how long it had been on the market.
GALILEO almost friendly: And why does it have to be physics? Why not horsebreeding?
Enter Mrs Sarti unobserved by Galileo.
LUDOVICO: Mother thinks you can’t do without a bit of science. Nobody can drink a glass of wine without science these days, you know.
GALILEO: Why didn’t you pick a dead language or theology? That’s easier. Sees Mrs Sarti. Right, come along on Tuesday morning. Ludovico leaves.
GALILEO: Don’t give me that look. I accepted him.
MRS SARTI: Because I caught your eye in time. The procurator of the university is out there.
GALILEO: Show him in, he matters. There may be 500 scudi in this. I wouldn’t have to bother with pupils. Mrs Sarti shows in the procurator. Galileo has finished dressing, meanwhile jotting down figures on a piece of paper.
GALILEO: Good morning. Lend us half a scudo. The procurator digs a coin out of his purse and Galileo gives it to Sarti. Sarti, tell Andrea to go to the spectacle-maker’s and get two lenses: there’s the prescription. Exit Mrs Sarti with the paper.