Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (37 page)

Two elements in the action with the child may be mentioned:

Washing himself in the background, Galileo observes the boy’s interest in the astrolabe as little Andrea circles around the strange instrument. L. emphasised what was novel in G. at that time by letting him look at the world around him as if he were a stranger and as if it needed explanation. His chuckling observation made fossils out of the monks at the Collegium Romanum. In that scene he also showed amusement at their primitive method of proof.

Some people objected to L.’s delivering his speech about the new astronomy in the first scene with a bare torso, claiming that it would confuse the audience if it were to hear such intellectual utterances from a half-naked man. But it was just this mixture of the physical and the intellectual that attracted L. ‘Galileo’s physical contentment’ at having his back rubbed by the boy is transformed into intellectual production. Again, in the ninth scene, L. brought out the fact that Galileo recovers his taste for wine on hearing of the reactionary pope’s expected demise. His sensual walking, the play of his hands in his pockets while he is planning new researches, came close to being offensive. Whenever Galileo is creative, L. displayed a mixture of aggressiveness and defenceless softness and vulnerability.

L. arranges a little demonstration of the earth’s rotation to be quick
and offhand, leaving his high desk where he has begun to read and returning to it. He avoids anything emphatic, seems to pay no attention to the child’s intellectual capacity, and at the end leaves him sitting there alone with his thoughts.

This casual manner, in keeping with his limited time, simultaneously admits the boy to the community of scholars. Thus L. demonstrated how for Galileo learning and teaching are one and the same – which makes his subsequent betrayal all the more horrible.

During this demonstration of the earth’s rotation Galileo is surprised by Andrea’s mother. Questioned about the nonsensical notions he is teaching the child he answers: ‘Apparently we are on the threshold of a new era, Mrs Sarti.’ The way in which L. caressingly emptied his glass of milk while he said it was enchanting.

A small detail: the housekeeper has gone to let the new student in. Galileo feels constrained to make a confession to Andrea. His science is in no very good state, its most important concerns must be concealed from the authorities, and for the moment they are only hypotheses. ‘I want to become an astronomer,’ Andrea says quickly. At this answer Galileo looks at him with an almost tender smile. Usually actors do not rehearse such details separately, or often, enough to render them quickly in the performance.

The dismissal of Andrea during the conversation with Ludovico is a piece of stage business for which time must be allowed. Galileo now drinks his milk as if it were the only pleasure to be had, and one which will not last very long. He is fully aware of Andrea’s presence. Ill-humouredly he sends him away. One of those unavoidable everyday compromises!

Ludovico Marsili describes a new spyglass which he has seen in Holland and cannot understand. Galileo asks for detailed information and makes a sketch which solves the problem. He holds the cardboard
with the sketch without showing it to his pupil, who expected to have a look. (L. insisted that the actor playing Ludovico should expect this.) The sketch itself he drew casually, just to solve a problem that offered some relief from the conversation. Then, his way of asking the housekeeper to send Andrea for lenses and borrowing a scudo from the entering procurator – all that had an automatic and routine quality. The whole incident seemed only to demonstrate that Galileo too was capable of ploughing water.

The birth of the telescope as a commodity took a long time to emerge clearly in the rehearsals. We found out why: L. had reacted too quickly and arrogantly to the university’s refusal of a grant. All was well as soon as he accepted the blow in hurt silence and then went on, almost sadly, to speak like a poor man. As a natural result, Galileo’s ‘Mr Priuli, I may have something for you,’ came out in a way to make Galileo’s dismissal of the new spyglass as ‘bosh’ perfectly clear.

When Andrea returns with the lenses he finds Galileo deep in his work. (L. has shown, during a by no means brief interval, how the scholar handles his books.) He has already forgotten the lenses, he lets the boy wait, then proceeds, almost guiltily because he has no desire to take up the lucrative bosh, to arrange the two lenses on a piece of cardboard. Finally he takes the ‘thing’ away, not without a little demonstration of his showmanship.

The senators surround and congratulate Galileo and draw him to the rear, but the tiny exchange with Ludovico Marsili, with its imputation of plagiarism, must as it were still hover in the air; for when the half-curtain closes behind them [Ludovico and Virginia] and in front of Galileo and the others, they continue and conclude the conversation while exiting along the footlights. And Ludovico’s cynical remark, ‘I am beginning to understand science,’ serves as a springboard for the ensuing third scene – that of the great discoveries.

3

[
Confidence in Objective Judgment
]

Galileo lets his friend Sagredo look through the telescope at the moon
and Jupiter. L. sat down, his back to the instrument, relaxed, as though his work was done and he only wanted his friend to pass impartial judgment on what he saw, and that this was all he needed to do since his friend was now seeing for himself. By this means he established that the new possibilities of observation must bring all controversy about the Copernican system to an end.

This attitude explains at the very beginning of the scene the boldness of his application for the lucrative position at the court of Florence.

The Historical Moment

L. conducted the exchange with his friend at the telescope without any emphasis. The more casually he acted, the more clearly one could sense the historic night; the more soberly he spoke, the more solemn the moment appeared.

An Embarrassment

When the procurator of the university comes in to complain about the fraud of the telescope, L.’s Galileo shows noticeable embarrassment by studiously looking through the telescope, obviously less to observe the sky than to avoid looking the procurator in the eye. Shamelessly he exploits the ‘higher’ function of the instrument which the Venetians have found not to be very profitable.

It is true that he also shows his behind to the angry man who has trusted him. But, far from trying to put him off with the discoveries of ‘pure’ science, he at once offers him another profitable item, the astronomical clock for ships. When the procurator has left, he sits glumly before the telescope, scratching his neck and telling Sagredo about his physical and intellectual needs which must be satisfied in one way or another. Science is a milch cow for all to milk, he himself of course included. While at this point in time Galileo’s attitude is still helpful to science, later on, in his fight with Rome, it is going to push science to the brink of the abyss, in other words, deliver it into the hands of the rulers.

The Wish Is Father to the Thought

Looking up from their calculations of the movements of Jupiter’s moons, Sagredo voices his concern for the man about to publish a
discovery so embarrassisng to the church. Galileo mentions the seductive power of evidence. He fishes a pebble from his pocket and lets it fall from palm to palm, following gravity: ‘Sooner or later everybody must succumb to it’ [the evidence]. As he argued along these lines, L. never forgot for a moment to do it in such a way that the audience would remember it later when he announced his decision to hand over his dangerous discoveries to the Catholic court of Florence.

[
Rejection of Virginia
]

L.’s Galileo used the little scene with his daughter Virginia to indicate how far he might be blamed for Virginia’s subsequent behaviour as a spy for the Inquisition. He does not take her interest in the telescope seriously and sends her off to matins. L. scrutinised his daughter after her question, ‘May I look through it?’ before replying, ‘What for? It’s not a toy.’

The Fun in Contradictions

Saying, ‘I am going to Florence,’ Galileo carefully signs his letter of application. In this hasty capitalisation of his discoveries as well as in his discourse on the seductive power of evidence and the representative value of great discoveries, L. left the spectator completely at liberty to study, criticise, admire Galileo’s contradictory personality.

4

The Acting of Anger

Vis-à-vis the court scholars who refuse to look through the telescope, because to do so would either confirm Aristotle’s doctrine or show up Galileo as a swindler, what L. acted was not so much anger as the attempt to dominate anger.

Servility

After Galileo, erupting at last, has threatened to take his new science to the dockyards, he sees the court depart abruptly. Deeply alarmed and disturbed, he follows the departing prince in cringing servility, stumbling, all dignity gone. In such a case an actor’s greatness can be
seen in the degree to which he can make the character’s behaviour incomprehensible or at least objectionable.

4 and 6
*

The Fight and the Particular Manner of Fighting

L. insisted that throughout the following scenes, 4 and 6, the sketch of Jupiter’s moons from Galileo’s original report should remain projected on the backdrop screen. It was a reminder of the fight. To show one of its aspects, the heel-cooling for the sake of truth, L., at the end of scene 4, when the chamberlain stays behind after the hasty departure of the court to inform him of the appeal to Rome, let himself be driven out of the space that stood for his house and stood in front of the half-curtain. He stood there between scenes 4 and 6 and again between scenes
6
and 7, waiting, and occasionally verifying that the pebble from his pocket continued to fall from one raised hand to the other stretched out below.

6

[
Observation of the Clergy
]

Galileo is not entirely devoid of appreciation when he observes the jeering monks at the Collegium Romanum – after all, by pretending to stand on a rolling globe they are trying to
prove
the absurdity of his propositions. The very old cardinal fills him with pity.

After the astronomer Clavius has confirmed Galileo’s findings, Galileo shows his pebble to the hostile cardinal who retreats in dismay; L. did this by no means triumphantly, rather as if he wanted to offer his adversary a last chance to convince himself.

Fame

Invited to the masked ball of Cardinals Bellarmin and Barberini, Galileo lingers for a moment in the anteroom alone with the clerical secretaries who later turn out to be secret agents. He has been greeted on his arrival by distinguished masked guests with great respect: obviously he stands in high favour. From the halls a boys’ choir is heard, and Galileo listens to one of these melancholic stanzas which
are sung amid the joy of life. L. needed no more than this brief listening and the word ‘Rome!’ to express the pride of the conqueror who has the capital of the world at his feet.

The Duel of Quotations

In the brief duel of Bible quotations with Cardinal Barberini, L.’s Galileo shows, beside the fun he has with such intellectual sport, that the possibility of an unfavourable outcome to his affairs is dawning on him. For the rest, the effectiveness of the scene depends on the elegance of its performance; L. made full use of his heavy body.

Two Things at Once

The brief argument about the capacity of the human brain (which the playwright was delighted to have heard formulated by Albert Einstein) furnished L. the opportunity to show two traits: 1) a certain arrogance of the professional when his field is invaded by laymen, and 2) an awareness of the difficulty of such a problem.

[
Disarmed by Lack of Logic
]

When the decree is read out forbidding the guest to teach a theory acknowledged to have been proven, L.’s Galileo reacts by twice turning abruptly from the reading secretaries to the liberal Barberini. Thunderstruck, he lets the two cardinals drag him to the ball as if he were a steer stunned by the axe. L. was able, in a manner the playwright cannot describe, to give the impression that what mainly disarmed Galileo was the lack of logic.

8

[
Indomitable Urge to Research
]

If in the seventh scene Galileo experiences the
No
of the church, in the eighth he is confronted with the
No
of the people. It comes from the lips of the little monk, himself a physicist. Galileo is disturbed, then recognises the situation: in the fight against science it is not the church that defends the peasant, but the peasant who defends the church. It was L.’s theatrical conception to let Galileo be so profoundly upset that he delivers his counter-arguments in a spirit of defence, even of angry self-defence, and makes the throwing down of the manuscript
into a gesture of helplessness. He blamed his indomitable urge to research like a sex offender blaming his glands.

Laughton Does Not Forget to Tell the Story

In the eighth scene one of Galileo’s lines contains a sentence which continues the story: ‘Should I condone this decree …’ L. distilled this small but important detail with great care.

9

[
The Impatience of Galileo the Scientist
]

Whereas L. insisted he must be allowed to give Galileo’s character a markedly criminal evolution after the recantation in scene 13, he did not feel a similar need at the beginning of scene 9. Here too, to oblige the church, Galileo has for many years abstained from publicising his discoveries, but this cannot be considered a betrayal like the later one. At this point the people know very little about the new science, the cause of the new astronomy has not yet been taken up by the North Italian bourgeoisie, the battle fronts are not yet political. There may not be an open declaration on his part, but there is no recantation either. In this scene therefore it is still the scientist’s personal impatience and dissatisfaction which must be portrayed.