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

by Bertolt Brecht

  REVELLER The procession!

  (The litter bearers speedily joggle out the King of Hungary. The Spectators turn and look at the first float of the procession, which now makes its appearance. It bears a gigantic figure of Galileo, holding in one hand an open Bible with the pages crossed out. The other hand points to the Bible, and the head mechanically turns from side to side as if to say “No! No!”)

  A LOUD VOICE Galileo, the Bible killer!

  (The laughter from the market place becomes uproarious. The Monk comes flying from the market place followed by delighted Children)

  Scene Ten

  The depths are hot, the heights are chill

  The streets are loud, the court is still.

  Ante-Chamber and staircase in the Medicean palace in Florence. Galileo, with a book under his arm, waits with his Daughter to be admitted to the presence of the Prince.

  VIRGINIA They are a long time.

  GALILEO Yes.

  VIRGINIA Who is that funny looking man? (She indicates the Informer who has entered casually and seated himself in the background, taking no apparent notice of Galileo)

  GALILEO I don’t know.

  VIRGINIA It’s not the first time I have seen him around. He gives me the creeps.

  GALILEO Nonsense. We’re in Florence, not among robbers in the mountains of Corsica.

  VIRGINIA Here comes the Rector.

  (The Rector comes down the stairs)

  GALILEO Gaffone is a bore. He attaches himself to you.

  (The Rector passes, scarcely nodding)

  GALILEO My eyes are bad today. Did he acknowledge us?

  VIRGINIA Barely. (Pause) What’s in your book? Will they say it’s heretical?

  GALILEO You hang around church too much. And getting up at dawn and scurrying to mass is ruining your skin. You pray for me, don’t you?

  (A Man comes down the stairs)

  VIRGINIA Here’s Mr. Matti. You designed a machine for his Iron Foundries.

  MATTI How were the squabs, Mr. Galilei? (Low) My brother and I had a good laugh the other day. He picked up a racy pamphlet against the Bible somewhere. It quoted you.

  GALILEO The squabs, Matti, were wonderful, thank you again. Pamphlets I know nothing about. The Bible and Homer are my favorite reading.

  MATTI No necessity to be cautious with me, Mr. Galilei. I am on your side. I am not a man who knows about the motions of the stars, but you have championed the freedom to teach new things. Take that mechanical cultivator they have in Germany which you described to me. I can tell you, it will never be used in this country. The same circles that are hampering you now will forbid the physicians at Bologna to cut up corpses for research. Do you know, they have such things as money markets in Amsterdam and in London? Schools for business, too. Regular papers with news. Here we are not even free to make money. I have a stake in your career. They are against iron foundries because they say the gathering of so many workers in one place fosters immorality! If they ever try anything, Mr. Galilei, remember you have friends in all walks of life including an iron founder. Good luck to you. (He goes)

  GALILEO Good man, but need he be so affectionate in public? His voice carries. They will always claim me as their spiritual leader particularly in places where it doesn’t help me at all. I have written a book about the mechanics of the firmament, that is all. What they do or don’t do with it is not my concern.

  VIRGINIA (loud) If people only knew how you disagreed with those goings-on all over the country last All Fools day.

  GALILEO Yes. Offer honey to a bear, and lose your arm if the beast is hungry.

  VIRGINIA (low) Did the prince ask you to come here today?

  GALILEO I sent word I was coming. He will want the book, he has paid for it. My health hasn’t been any too good lately. I may accept Sagredo’s invitation to stay with him in Padua for a few weeks.

  VIRGINIA You couldn’t manage without your books.

  GALILEO Sagredo has an excellent library.

  VIRGINIA We haven’t had this month’s salary yet –

  GALILEO Yes. (The Cardinal Inquisitor passes down the staircase. He bows deeply in answer to Galileo’s bow) What is he doing in Florence? If they try to do anything to me, the new Pope will meet them with an iron NO. And the Prince is my pupil, he would never have me extradited.

  VIRGINIA Psst. The Lord Chamberlain.

  (The Lord Chamberlain comes down the stairs)

  LORD CHAMBERLAIN His Highness had hoped to find time for you, Mr. Galilei. Unfortunately, he has to leave immediately to judge the parade at the Riding Academy. On what business did you wish to see His Highness?

  GALILEO I wanted to present my book to His Highness.

  LORD CHAMBERLAIN How are your eyes today?

  GALILEO So, so. With His Highness’ permission, I am dedicating the book …

  LORD CHAMBERLAIN Your eyes are a matter of great concern to His Highness. Could it be that you have been looking too long and too often through your marvelous tube? (He leaves without accepting the book)

  VIRGINIA (greatly agitated) Father, I am afraid.

  GALILEO He didn’t take the book, did he? (Low and resolute) Keep a straight face. We are not going home, but to the house of the lens-grinder. There is a coach and horses in his backyard. Keep your eyes to the front, don’t look back at that man. (They start. The Lord Chamberlain comes back)

  LORD CHAMBERLAIN Oh, Mr. Galilei, His Highness has just charged me to inform you that the Florentine Court is no longer in a position to oppose the request of the Holy Inquisition to interrogate you in Rome.

  Scene Eleven

  The Pope

  A chamber in the Vatican. The Pope, Urban VIII – formerly Cardinal Barberini – is giving audience to the Cardinal Inquisitor. The trampling and shuffling of many feet is heard throughout the scene from the adjoining corridors. During the scene the Pope is being robed for the conclave he is about to attend: at the beginning of the scene he is plainly Barberini, but as the scene proceeds he is more and more obscured by grandiose vestments.

  POPE No! No! No!

  INQUISITOR (referring to the owners of the shuffling feet) Doctors of all chairs from the universities, representatives of the special orders of the Church, representatives of the clergy as a whole who have come believing with child-like faith in the word of God as set forth in the Scriptures, who have come to hear Your Holiness confirm their faith: and Your Holiness is really going to tell them that the Bible can no longer be regarded as the alphabet of truth?

  POPE I will not set myself up against the multiplication table. No!

  INQUISITOR Ah, that is what these people say, that it is the multiplication table. Their cry is, “The figures compel us,” but where do these figures come from? Plainly they come from doubt. These men doubt everything. Can society stand on doubt and not on faith? “Thou art my master, but I doubt whether it is for the best.” “This is my neighbor’s house and my neighbor’s wife, but why shouldn’t they belong to me?” After the plague, after the new war, after the unparalleled disaster of the Reformation, your dwindling flock look to their shepherd, and now the mathematicians turn their tubes on the sky and announce to the world that you have not the best advice about the heavens either – up to now your only uncontested sphere of influence. This Galilei started meddling in machines at an early age. Now that men in ships are venturing on the great oceans – I am not against that of course – they are putting their faith in a brass bowl they call a compass and not in Almighty God.

  POPE This man is the greatest physicist of our time. He is the light of Italy, and not just any muddle-head.

  INQUISITOR Would we have had to arrest him otherwise? This bad man knows what he is doing, not writing his books in Latin, but in the jargon of the market place.

  POPE (occupied with the shuffling feet) That was not in the best of taste. (A pause) These shuffling feet are making me nervous.

  INQUISITOR May they be more telling than my words, Your Holiness. Shall all these go from you with
doubt in their hearts?

  POPE This man has friends. What about Versailles? What about the Viennese court? They will call Holy Church a cesspool for defunct ideas. Keep your hands off him.

  INQUISITOR In practice it will never get far. He is a man of the flesh. He would soften at once.

  POPE He has more enjoyment in him than any man I ever saw. He loves eating and drinking and thinking. To excess. He indulges in thinking-bouts! He cannot say no to an old wine or a new thought. (Furious) I do not want a condemnation of physical facts. I do not want to hear battle cries: Church, church, church! Reason, reason, reason! (Pause) These shuffling feet are intolerable. Has the whole world come to my door?

  INQUISITOR Not the whole world, Your Holiness. A select gathering of the faithful.

  (Pause)

  POPE (exhausted) It is clearly understood: he is not to be tortured.

  (Pause) At the very most, he may be shown the instruments.

  INQUISITOR That will be adequate, Your Holiness. Mr. Galilei understands machinery.

  (The eyes of Barberini look helplessly at the Cardinal Inquisitor from under the completely assembled panoply of Pope Urban VIII)

  Scene Twelve

  June twenty second, sixteen thirty three,

  A momentous date for you and me.

  Of all the days that was the one

  An age of reason could have begun.

  Again the garden of the Florentine Ambassador at Rome, where Galileo’s assistants wait the news of the trial. The Little Monk and Federzoni are attempting to concentrate on a game of chess. Virginia kneels in a corner, praying and counting her beads.

  LITTLE MONK The Pope didn’t even grant him an audience.

  FEDERZONI No more scientific discussions.

  ANDREA The “Discorsi” will never be finished. The sum of his findings. They will kill him.

  FEDERZONI (stealing a glance at him) Do you really think so?

  ANDREA He will never recant.

  (Silence)

  LITTLE MONK You know when you lie awake at night how your mind fastens on to something irrelevant. Last night I kept thinking: if only they would let him take his little stone in with him, the appeal-to-reason-pebble that he always carried in his pocket.

  FEDERZONI In the room they’ll take him to, he won’t have a pocket.

  ANDREA But he will not recant.

  LITTLE MONK How can they beat the truth out of a man who gave his sight in order to see?

  FEDERZONI Maybe they can’t.

  (Silence)

  ANDREA (speaking about Virginia) She is praying that he will recant.

  FEDERZONI Leave her alone. She doesn’t know whether she’s on her head or on her heels since they got hold of her. They brought her Father Confessor from Florence. (The Informer of Scene Ten enters)

  INFORMER Mr. Galilei will be here soon. He may need a bed.

  FEDERZONI Have they let him out?

  INFORMER Mr. Galilei is expected to recant at five o’clock. The big bell of Saint Marcus will be rung and the complete text of his recantation publicly announced.

  ANDREA I don’t believe it.

  INFORMER Mr. Galilei will be brought to the garden gate at the back of the house, to avoid the crowds collecting in the street. (He goes)

  (Silence)

  ANDREA The moon is an earth because the light of the moon is not her own. Jupiter is a fixed star, and four moons turn around Jupiter, therefore we are not shut in by crystal shells. The sun is the pivot of our world, therefore the earth is not the center. The earth moves, spinning about the sun. And he showed us. You can’t make a man unsee what he has seen.

  (Silence)

  FEDERZONI Five o’clock is one minute.

  (Virginia prays louder)

  ANDREA Listen all of you, they are murdering the truth.

  (He stops up his ears with his fingers. The two other pupils do the same. Federzoni goes over to the Little Monk, and all of them stand absolutely still in cramped positions. Nothing happens. No bell sounds. After a silence, filled with the murmur of Virginia’s prayers, Federzoni runs to the wall to look at the clock. He turns around, his expression changed. He shakes his head. They drop their hands)

  FEDERZONI No. No bell. It is three minutes after.

  LITTLE MONK He hasn’t.

  ANDREA He held true. It is all right, it is all right.

  LITTLE MONK He did not recant.

  FEDERZONI No.

  (They embrace each other, they are delirious with joy)

  ANDREA So force cannot accomplish everything. What has been seen can’t be unseen. Man is constant in the face of death.

  FEDERZONI June 22, 1633: dawn of the age of reason. I wouldn’t have wanted to go on living if he had recanted.

  LITTLE MONK I didn’t say anything, but I was in agony. Oh, ye of little faith!

  ANDREA I was sure.

  FEDERZONI It would have turned our morning to night.

  ANDREA It would have been as if the mountain had turned to water.

  LITTLE MONK (kneeling down, crying) Oh God, I thank Thee.

  ANDREA Beaten humanity can lift its head. A man has stood up and said “no.”

  (At this moment the bell of Saint Marcus begins to toll. They stand like statues. Virginia stands up)

  VIRGINIA The bell of Saint Marcus. He is not damned.

  (From the street one hears the Town Crier reading Galileo’s recantation)

  TOWN CRIER I, Galileo Galilei, Teacher of Mathematics and Physics, do hereby publicly renounce my teaching that the earth moves. I foreswear this teaching with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith and detest and curse this and all other errors and heresies repugnant to the Holy Scriptures.

  (The lights dim; when they come up again the bell of Saint Marcus is petering out. Virginia has gone but the Scholars are still there waiting)

  ANDREA (loud) The mountain did turn to water.

  (Galileo has entered quietly and unnoticed. He is changed, almost unrecognizable. He has heard Andrea. He waits some seconds by the door for somebody to greet him. Nobody does. They retreat from him. He goes slowly and, because of his bad sight, uncertainly, to the front of the stage where he finds a chair, and sits down)

  ANDREA I can’t look at him. Tell him to go away.

  FEDERZONI Steady.

  ANDREA (hysterically) He saved his big gut.

  FEDERZONI Get him a glass of water.

  (The Little Monk fetches a glass of water for Andrea. Nobody acknowledges the presence of Galileo, who sits silently on his chair listening to the voice of the Town Crier, now in another street)

  ANDREA I can walk. Just help me a bit. (They help him to the door)

  ANDREA (in the door) “Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero.”

  GALILEO No, Andrea: “Unhappy is the land that needs a hero.”

  (Before the next scene a curtain with the following legend on it is lowered)

  You can plainly see that if a horse were to fall from a height of three or four feet, it could break its bones, whereas a dog would not suffer injury. The same applies to a cat from a height of as much as eight or ten feet, to a grasshopper from the top of a tower, and to an ant falling down from the moon. Nature could not allow a horse to become as big as twenty horses nor a giant as big as ten men, unless she were to change the proportions of all its members, particularly the bones. Thus the common assumption that great and small structures are equally tough is obviously wrong.

  – From the “Discorsi”

  Scene Thirteen

  1633–1642.

  Galileo Galilei remains a prisoner

  of the Inquisition until his death.

  A country house near Florence. A large room simply furnished. There is a huge table, a leather chair, a globe of the world on a stand, and a narrow bed. A portion of the adjoining anteroom is visible, and the front door which opens into it. An Official of the Inquisition sits on guard in the anteroom. In the large room, Galileo is quietly experimenting with a bent wooden rail and a small ball of
wood. He is still vigorous but almost blind. After a while there is a knocking at the outside door. The Official opens it to a peasant who brings a plucked goose. Virginia comes from the kitchen. She is past forty.

  PEASANT (handing the goose to Virginia) I was told to deliver this here.

  VIRGINIA I didn’t order a goose.

  PEASANT I was told to say it’s from someone who was passing through.

  (Virginia takes the goose, surprised. The Official takes it from her and examines it suspiciously. Then, reassured, he hands it back to her. The Peasant goes. Virginia brings the goose in to Galileo)

  VIRGINIA Somebody who was passing through sent you something.

  GALILEO What is it?

  VIRGINIA Can’t you see it?

  GALILEO No. (He walks over) A goose. Any name?

  VIRGINIA No.

  GALILEO (weighing the goose) Solid.

  VIRGINIA (cautiously) Will you eat the liver, if I have it cooked with a little apple?

  GALILEO I had my dinner. Are you under orders to finish me off with food?

  VIRGINIA It’s not rich. And what is wrong with your eyes again? You should be able to see it.

  GALILEO You were standing in the light.

  VIRGINIA I was not. – You haven’t been writing again?

  GALILEO (sneering) What do you think?

  (Virginia takes the goose out into the anteroom and speaks to the Official)

  VIRGINIA You had better ask Monsignor Carpula to send the doctor. Father couldn’t see this goose across the room. – Don’t look at me like that. He has not been writing. He dictates everything to me, as you know.

  OFFICIAL Yes?

  VIRGINIA He abides by the rules. My father’s repentance is sincere. I keep an eye on him. (She hands him the goose) Tell the cook to fry the liver with an apple and an onion. (She goes back into the large room) And you have no business to be doing that with those eyes of yours, father.

  GALILEO You may read me some Horace.