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

by Bertolt Brecht

  VIRGINIA: You’ve always said it doesn’t travel. And the court owes you three months’ salary. They’ll never forward it.

  GALILEO: That’s true.

  The Cardinal Inquisitor comes down the stairs.

  VIRGINIA: The Cardinal Inquisitor.

  As he walks past he makes a deep bow to Galileo.

  VIRGINIA: What’s the Cardinal Inquisitor doing in Florence, Father?

  GALILEO: I don’t know. He behaved quite respectfully. I knew what I was doing when I came to Florence and kept quiet for all those years. They’ve paid me such tributes that now they’re forced to accept me as I am.

  THE OFFICIAL calls out: His Highness the Grand Duke! Cosimo de Medici comes down the staircase. Galileo goes to meet him. Cosimo stops somewhat embarrassedly.

  GALILEO: I wanted to bring my Dialogues on Two World Systems to your …

  COSIMO: Ah, yes. How are your eyes?

  GALILEO: Not too good, your Highness. If your Highness permits, I have the book …

  COSIMO: The state of your eyes worries me. It worries me, truly. It shows me that you’ve been a little too eager to use that admirable tube of yours, haven’t you?

  He walks on without accepting the book.

  GALILEO: He didn’t take the book, did he?

  VIRGINIA: Father, I’m scared.

  GALILEO firmly, in a low voice: Control your feelings. We’re not going home after this, we’re going to Volpi the glazier’s. I’ve fixed with him to have a cart full of empty barrels standing permanently in the yard of the wine house next door, ready to take me out of the city.

  VIRGINIA: So you knew …

  GALILEO: Don’t look round.

  They start to go.

  A HIGH OFFICIAL comes down the stairs: Mr Galilei, I have been charged to tell you that the court of Florence is no longer in a position to oppose the Holy Inquisition’s wish to interrogate you in Rome. The coach of the Holy Inquisition awaits you, Mr Galilei.

  12

  The Pope

  Room in the Vatican. Pope Urban VIII (formerly Cardinal Barberini) has received the Cardinal Inquisitor. In the course of the audience he is robed. Outside is heard the shuffling of many feet.

  THE POPE very loudly: No! No! No!

  THE INQUISITOR: So it is your Holiness’s intention to go before this gathering of doctors from every faculty, representatives of every order and the entire clergy, all with their naive faith in the word of God as set down in the Scriptures, who are now assembling here to have that trust confirmed by your Holiness, and tell them that those Scriptures can no longer be regarded as true?

  THE POPE: I am not going to have the multiplication table broken. No!

  THE INQUISITOR: Ah, it’s the multiplication table, not the spirit of insubordination and doubt: that’s what these people will tell you. But it isn’t the multiplication table. No, a terrible restlessness has descended on the world. It is the restlessness of their own brain which these people have transferred to the unmoving earth. They shout ‘But look at the figures’. But where do their figures come from? Everybody knows they originate in doubt. These people doubt everything. Are we to base human society on doubt and no longer on faith? ‘You are my lord, but I doubt if that’s a good thing.’ ‘This is your house and your wife, but I doubt if they shouldn’t be mine.’ Against that we have your Holiness’s love of art, to which we owe our fine collections, being subjected to such disgraceful interpretations as we see scrawled on the walls of Roman houses: ‘The Barberinis take what the Barbarians left’. And abroad? Your Holiness’s Spanish policy has been misinterpreted by short-sighted critics, its antagonising of the Emperor regretted. For the last fifteen years Germany has been running with blood, and men have quoted the Bible as they hacked each other to pieces. And at this moment, just when Christianity is being shrivelled into little enclaves by plague, war and the Reformation, a rumour is going through Europe that you have made a secret pact with protestant Sweden in order to weaken the Catholic emperor. So what do these wretched mathematicians do but go and point their tubes at the sky and inform the whole world that your Holiness is hopelessly at sea in the one area nobody has yet denied you? There’s every reason to be surprised at this sudden interest in an obscure subject like astronomy. Who really cares how these spheres rotate? But thanks to the example of this wretched Florentine all Italy, down to the last stable boy, is now gossiping about the phases of Venus, nor can they fail at the same time to think about a lot of other irksome things that schools and others hold to be incontrovertible. Given the weakness of their flesh and their liability to excesses of all kinds, what would the effect be if they were to believe in nothing but their own reason, which this maniac has set up as the sole tribunal? They would start by wondering if the sun stood still over Gibeon, then extend their filthy scepticism to the offertory box. Ever since they began voyaging across the seas – and I’ve nothing against that – they have placed their faith in a brass ball they call a compass, not in God. This fellow Galileo was writing about machines even when he was young. With machines they hope to work miracles. What sort? God anyhow is no longer necessary to them, but what kind of miracle is it to be? The abolition of top and bottom, for one. They’re not needed any longer. Aristotle, whom they otherwise regard as a dead dog, has said – and they quote this – that once the shuttle weaves by itself and the plectrum plays the zither of its own accord, then masters would need no apprentice and lords no servants. And they think they are already there. This evil man knows what he is up to when he writes his astronomical works not in Latin but in the idiom of fishwives and wool merchants.

  THE POPE: That’s very bad taste; I shall tell him.

  THE INQUISITOR: He agitates some of them and bribes others. The north Italian ports are insisting more and more that they must have Mr Galilei’s star charts for their ships. We’ll have to give in to them, material interests are at stake.

  THE POPE: But those star charts are based on his heretical theories. They presuppose certain motions on the part of the heavenly bodies which are impossible if you reject his doctrine. You can’t condemn the doctrine and accept the charts.

  THE INQUISITOR: Why not? It’s the only way.

  THE POPE: This shuffling is getting on my nerves. I cannot help listening to it.

  THE INQUISITOR: It may speak to you more persuasively than I can, your Holiness. Are all these people to leave here with doubt in their hearts?

  THE POPE: After all the man is the greatest physicist of our time, the light of Italy, and not just any old crank. He has friends. There is Versailles. There’s the Viennese Court. They’ll call Holy Church a cesspool of decomposing prejudices. Hands off him!

  THE INQUISITOR: Practically speaking one wouldn’t have to push it very far with him. He is a man of the flesh. He would give in immediately.

  THE POPE: He enjoys himself in more ways than any man I have ever met. His thinking springs from sensuality. Give him an old wine or a new idea, and he cannot say no. But I won’t have any condemnation of the physical facts, no war cries of ‘Up the Church’ ‘Up Reason’. I let him write his book on condition that he finished it by saying that the last word lay with faith, not science. He met that condition.

  THE INQUISITOR: But how? His book shows a stupid man, representing the view of Aristotle of course, arguing with a clever one who of course represents Mr Galilei’s own; and which do you think, your Holiness, delivers the final remark?

  THE POPE: What did you say? Well, which of them expresses our view?

  THE INQUISITOR: Not the clever one.

  THE POPE: Yes, that is an impertinence. All this stamping in the corridors is really unbearable. Is the whole world coming here?

  THE INQUISITOR: Not the whole of it but its best part. Pause. The Pope is now in his full robes.

  THE POPE: At the very most he can be shown the instruments.

  THE INQUISITOR: That will be enough, your Holiness. Instruments are Mr Galilei’s speciality.

  13

&nb
sp; Before the Inquisition, on June 22nd 1633, Galileo recants his doctrine of the motion of the earth

  June twenty-second, sixteen thirty-three

  A momentous day for you and me.

  Of all the days that was the one

  An age of reason could have begun.

  In the Florentine ambassador’s palace in Rome. Galileo’s pupils are waiting for news. Federzoni and the little monk are playing new-style chess with its sweeping moves. In one corner Virginia kneels saying the Ave Maria.

  THE LITTLE MONK: The Pope wouldn’t receive him. No more discussions about science.

  FEDERZONI: That was his last hope. It’s true what he told him years back in Rome when he was still Cardinal Barberini:

  We need you. Now they’ve got him.

  ANDREA: They’ll kill him. The Discorsi will never get finished.

  FEDERZONI gives him a covert look: You think so?

  ANDREA: Because he’ll never recant.

  Pause.

  THE LITTLE MONK: You keep getting quite irrelevant thoughts when you can’t sleep. Last night for instance I kept on thinking, he ought never to have left the Venetian Republic.

  ANDREA: He couldn’t write his book there.

  FEDERZONI: And in Florence he couldn’t publish it.

  Pause.

  THE LITTLE MONK: I also wondered if they’d let him keep his little stone he always carries in his pocket. His proving stone.

  FEDERZONI: You don’t wear pockets where they’ll be taking him.

  ANDREA shouting: They daren’t do that! And even if they do he’ll not recant. ‘Someone who doesn’t know the truth is just thick-headed. But someone who does know it and calls it a lie is a crook.’

  FEDERZONI: I don’t believe it either and I wouldn’t want to go on living if he did it. But they do have the power.

  ANDREA: Power can’t achieve everything.

  FEDERZONI: Perhaps not.

  THE LITTLE MONK softly: This is his twenty-fourth day in prison. Yesterday was the chief hearing. And today they’re sitting on it. Aloud, as Andrea is listening: That time I came to see him here two days after the decree we sat over there and he showed me the little Priapus by the sundial in the garden – you can see it from here – and he compared his own work with a poem by Horace which cannot be altered either. He talked about his sense of beauty, saying that was what forced him to look for the truth. And he quoted the motto ‘Hieme et aestate, et prope et procul, usque dum vivam et ultra’. And he was referring to truth.

  ANDREA to the little monk: Have you told him the way he stood in the Collegium Romanum when they were testing his tube? Tell him! The little monk shakes his head. He behaved just as usual. He had his hands on his hams, thrust out his tummy and said ‘I would like a bit of reason, please, gentlemen.’

  Laughing, he imitates Galileo.

  Pause.

  ANDREA referring to Virginia: She is praying that he’ll recant.

  FEDERZONI: Leave her alone. She’s been all confused ever since they spoke to her. They brought her father confessor down from Florence.

  The individual from the Grand-Ducal palace in Florence enters.

  INDIVIDUAL: Mr Galilei will be here shortly. He may need a bed.

  FEDERZONI: Have they released him?

  INDIVIDUAL: It is expected that Mr Galilei will recant around five o’clock at a full sitting of the Inquisition. The great bell of St Mark’s will be rung and the text of his recantation will be proclaimed in public.

  ANDREA: I don’t believe it.

  INDIVIDUAL: In view of the crowds in the streets Mr Galilei will be brought to the garden gate here at the back of the palace.

  Exit.

  ANDREA suddenly in a loud voice: The moon is an earth and has no light of its own. Likewise Venus has no light of its own and is like the earth and travels round the sun. And four moons revolve round the planet Jupiter which is on a level with the fixed stars and is unattached to any crystal sphere. And the sun is the centre of the cosmos and motionless, and the earth is not the centre and not motionless. And he is the one who showed us this.

  THE LITTLE MONK: And no force will help them to make what has been seen unseen.

  Silence.

  FEDERZONI looks at the sundial in the garden: Five o’clock. Virginia prays louder.

  ANDREA: I can’t wait any more. They’re beheading the truth. He puts his hands over his ears, as does the little monk. But the bell is not rung. After a pause filled only by Virginia’s murmured prayers, Federzoni shakes his head negatively. The others let their hands drop.

  FEDERZONI hoarsely: Nothing. It’s three minutes past the hour.

  ANDREA: He’s holding out.

  THE LITTLE MONK: He’s not recanting.

  FEDERZONI: No. Oh, how marvellous for us!

  They embrace. They are ecstatically happy.

  ANDREA: So force won’t do the trick. There are some things it can’t do. So stupidity has been defeated, it’s not invulnerable. So man is not afraid of death.

  FEDERZONI: This truly is the start of the age of knowledge. This is the hour of its birth. Imagine if he had recanted.

  THE LITTLE MONK: I didn’t say, but I was worried silly. O ye of little faith!

  ANDREA: But I knew.

  FEDERZONI: Like nightfall in the morning, it would have been.

  ANDREA: As if the mountain had said ‘I’m a lake’.

  THE LITTLE MONK kneels down weeping: Lord, I thank thee.

  ANDREA: But today everything is altered. Man, so tormented, is lifting his head and saying ‘I can live’. Such a lot is won when even a single man gets to his feet and says No. At this moment the bell of Saint Mark’s begins to toll. All stand rigid.

  VIRGINIA gets up: The bell of Saint Mark’s. He is not damned! From the street outside we hear the crier reading Galileo’s recantation:

  CRIER’S VOICE: ‘I, Galileo Galilei, teacher of mathematics and physics in Florence, abjure what I have taught, namely that the sun is the centre of the cosmos and motionless and the earth is not the centre and not motionless. I foreswear, detest and curse, with sincere heart and unfeigned faith, all these errors and heresies as also any error and any further opinion repugnant to Holy Church.’

  It grows dark.

  When the light returns the bell is still tolling, but then stops. Virginia has left. Galileo’s pupils are still there.

  FEDERZONI: You know, he never paid you for your work. You could never publish your own stuff or buy yourself new breeches. You stood for it because it was ‘working for the sake of science’.

  ANDREA loudly: Unhappy the land that has no heroes!

  Galileo has entered, so completely changed by his trial as to be almost unrecognisable. He has heard Andrea’s remark. For a few moments he stands at the gate waiting to be greeted. When he is not, and his pupils back away from him, he goes slowly and, on account of his bad eyes, uncertainly forward till he finds a stool and sits down.

  ANDREA: I can’t look at him. Get him away.

  FEDERZONI: Calm down.

  ANDREA yells at Galileo: Wine-pump! Snail-eater! Did you save your precious skin? Sits down: I feel ill.

  GALILEO quietly: Give him a glass of water.

  The little monk fetches Andrea a glass of water from outside. The others do nothing about Galileo, who sits on his stool and listens. Outside the crier’s voice can again be heard in the distance.

  ANDREA: I think I can walk with a bit of help.

  They escort him to the door. At this juncture Galileo starts to speak.

  GALILEO: No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.

  A reading before the curtain:

  Is it not obvious that a horse falling from a height of three or four ells will break its legs, whereas a dog would not suffer any damage, nor would a cat from a height of eight or nine ells, nor a cricket from a tower nor an ant even if it were to fall from the moon? And just as smaller animals are comparatively stronger than larger ones, so small plants too stand up better: an oak tree t
wo hundred ells high cannot sustain its branches in the same proportion as a small oak tree, nor can nature let a horse grow as large as twenty horses or produce a giant ten times the size of man unless it changes all the proportions of the limbs and especially of the bones, which would have to be strengthened far beyond the size demanded by mere proportion. – The common assumption that large and small machines are equally durable is apparently erroneous.

  Galileo. Discorsi.

  14

  1633—1642. Galileo Galilei lives in a house in the country near Florence, a prisoner of the Inquisition till he dies. The ‘Discorsi’

  A large room with table, leather chair and globe. Galileo, old now and half blind, is carefully experimenting with a bent wooden rail and a small ball of wood. In the antechamber sits a monk on guard. There is a knock at the door. The monk opens it and a peasant comes in carrying two plucked geese. Virginia emerges from the kitchen. She is now about forty years old.

  THE PEASANT: They told me to deliver these.

  VIRGINIA: Who? I didn’t order any geese.

  THE PEASANT: They told me to say it was someone passing through. Virginia looks at the geese in amazement. The monk takes them from her and examines them dubiously. Then he gives them back to her, satisfied, and she carries them by their necks to Galileo in the large room.

  VIRGINIA: Somebody passing through has sent us a present.

  GALILEO: What is it?

  VIRGINIA: Can’t you see?

  GALILEO: No. He walks over. Geese. Any name on them?

  VIRGINIA: No.

  GALILEO takes one of the geese from her: Heavy. I could eat some of that.

  VIRGINIA: Don’t tell me you’re hungry again; you’ve just had your supper. And what’s wrong with your eyes this time? You should have been able to see them from where you are.

  GALILEO: You’re in the shadow.

  VIRGINIA: I’m not in the shadow. She takes the geese out.

  GALILEO: Put thyme with them, and apples.

  VIRGINIA to the monk: We’ll have to get the eye doctor in. Father couldn’t see the geese from his table.

  THE MONK: Not till I’ve cleared it with Monsignor Carpula. Has he been writing again?