Brecht Collected Plays: 1: Baal; Drums in the Night; In the Jungle of Cities; Life of Edward II of England; & 5 One Act Plays: "Baal", "Drums in the Night", "In the Jungle of Ci (World Classics) (62 page)

4. In
The Wheel
(p. 162) Lee says of Evanston, ‘What was one to do about a man whose nerves hardly reached his skin?’

5. Cf.
The Wheel
, p. 221: ‘In all the streets people began to move about, all the faithful early risers in the city, people like himself, whom he had always fully comprehended, whether they were driving in their waggons or were striding off with their tools, or were half-running along the sidewalk, a mountain of fresh newspapers on their shoulders.’ There is a similar echo in Shen Teh’s speech in scene 4 of
The Good Person of Szechwan
.

6. ‘L’époux infernal’ is the subheading of the first ‘Délire’ in
Une saison en enfer
, where the virgin exclaims, ‘Je suis esclave de l’Epoux infernal, celui qui a perdu les vierges folles.’

7. Rimbaud: ‘J’aimai le désert, les vergers brûlés, les boutiques fanées, les boissons tiédies.’

8. No such passage was found in Rimbaud, but perhaps Brecht was inspired by Rimbaud’s lines: ‘Je suis veuve… J’étais veuve…’in the first ‘Délire’ above.

9. In
The Wheel
, too, Evanston reproaches Lee for drinking.

10. ‘Une souffle ouvre les breches opératiques dans les cloisons’ are the opening words of ‘Nocturne Vulgaire’ in
Les Illuminations
.

11. These are said to have been the dying words of Frederick the Great.

12. In
The Wheel
Lee refuses Evanston’s love because he finds him so unappealing, because he ‘knew instinctively that Evanston was an old man’ (p. 168), ‘a worm of the past’ (p. 245), who fought ‘with the powers of an ape and mostly with the corruption of age’ (p. 297).

13. This key speech echoes both Rimbaud’s ‘J’enviais la félicité des bêtes’ and many passages from
The Wheel
. Note Evanston’s remark (p. 216) that ‘the only thing real in this world is sensual lust …the only proof I have of being alive is that I die of pleasure’. And several times Jensen describes how Evanston confronts Lee ‘like a beast of prey, baring his teeth’ (p. 163), and how ‘they faced each other like two wild animals’ (p. 280).

14. Towards the end of their fight, Lee in
The Wheel
complains of his adversary’s ‘endless babbling’ (p. 293).

15. Rimbaud,
Une saison en enfer
: ‘Je reviendrai, avec des membres de fer, la peau sombre, l’oeil furieux; sur mon masque, on me jugera d’une race forte. J’aurai de l’or: je serai oisif et brutal. Les femmes soignent ces féroces infirmes retour des pays chauds. Je serai melé aux affaires politiques. Sauvé.’

16. The final scene recalls what happens at the end of
The Wheel
when Lee decides to devote himself to his dead father-in-law’s business: ‘The everyday had returned with its chances and ways, the everyday and the old taste for work.’

Adapting Marlowe’s
Edward the Second
was a job which I undertook in collaboration with Lion Feuchtwanger because I had to do a production at the Munich Kammerspiele. Today it is hard for me to come to terms with it. We wanted to make possible a production which would break with the Shakespearean tradition common to German theatres: that lumpy monumental style beloved of middle-class philistines. I am reprinting it without any changes. The reader may find something to interest him in the narrative methods of the Elizabethans and in the emergence of a new stage language.

[From ‘Bei Durchsicht meiner ersten Stücke’. Foreword to
Stücke I
, all editions except the first. Dated March 1954.]

No manuscript, typescript or prompt copy of the play has yet come to the notice of the Brecht Archive. Nor did Brecht write any formal notes to it. The version which he decided to print unchanged in the collected
Stücke
was that published by Kiepenheuer in 1924, the year of the play’s original production. (There were, in fact, some very slight editorial changes, probably not by Brecht himself.)

The version of Marlowe’s play which Brecht and Feuchtwanger used was a German translation by Alfred Walter Heymel, originally published by Insel-Verlag (Leipzig) before the First World War. It has been reprinted by Dr Reinhold Grimm in the Edition Suhrkamp volume
Leben Eduards des Zweiten von England. Vorlage, Texte und Materialien
(Frankfurt, 1968). Miss Louise Laboulle has calculated that they took over about one-sixth of Marlowe’s lines, but even where they did so they often changed Heymel’s wording.

In the same volume there is a reprint of the extract originally published in the Munich literary magazine
Der neue Merkur
in February 1924, on the eve of the premiere. This only goes up to the end of Anne’s scene with Mortimer after the (imaginary) Battle of Killingworth (p. 221), but already contains one or two major differences from the final version. In particular it follows Marlowe in having Edward sign the decree banishing Gaveston when the Archbishop threatens to ‘discharge these peers / Of duty and allegiance due to thee’. Edward then persuades Anne to seduce Mortimer as best she can (part of the dialogue was later brought forward to the catapult-showing scene) to have the decree rescinded. Gaveston, as in Marlowe, returns from Ireland and is assaulted by the peers. In the final version, of course, Edward refuses to sign, and the battle immediately follows (after a hypothetical gap of nine years).

Other differences include the swapping round of the catapult scene with that where Mortimer is discovered alone with his books, and the omission of Gaveston’s monologue when writing his will. In the opening scene a few lines are left of Gaveston’s best-known speech from the original (‘I must have wanton poets…’), which is
entirely missing from the final version. Lancaster’s comment on Edward’s love for Gaveston is also perhaps worth recording: ‘Goddam!’ he says. ‘That’s what I call passion.’

The magazine called the play a ‘History by Bertolt Brecht’, without mentioning either Feuchtwanger or Marlowe. Feuchtwanger’s name was also apparently missing from the programme of the first Berlin production at the end of the same year, and the exact nature and extent of his contribution cannot as yet be judged. Brecht’s own note ‘I wrote this play with Lion Feuchtwanger. Bertolt Brecht’ should be set against the corresponding note three years later to the published version of Feuchtwanger’s
Kalkutta. 4 Mai
: ‘I wrote this play with Bertolt Brecht. Lion Feuchtwanger.’ (Strictly speaking this was a joint revision, made in 1925, of a play written by Feuchtwanger in 1915.) No trace has been found of the revised text of 1926 referred to in an undated note (p. 141 of the volume
Im Dickicht der Städte. Erstfassung und Materialien
in the Edition Suhrkamp series: not included in GW). The relevant passage goes:

Thus in
Edward
(second version, summer 1926), I have tried to sketch that great sombre beast which felt the first shock-waves of a mighty global disaster threatening the individual like premonitions of an earthquake. I have shown his primitive and desperate measures, his terrible and anachronistically isolated finish. In those years the last of the saurians loomed up before the eyes of posterity, heralding the Flood.

It is the same idea as in scene 1 of the 1926 revision of
Baal
.

The only one of these five small plays to be performed in Brecht’s lifetime was
A Respectable Wedding
, which was staged at the Frankfurt-am-Main Schauspielhaus on 11 December 1926 in a double bill with Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s farce
Ollapotrida
, a work which had helped earn its author that year’s Kleist Prize. Both were directed by the young dramatist Melchior Vischer, one of the runners-up for the same prize in 1923, when Alfred Döblin made the awards. They were not a great critical success. Brecht’s play was then called
The Wedding
.

Brecht’s Augsburg friend H. O. Miinsterer says that he read the five plays, with the exception of
The Catch
, at the end of November 1919. They were not, however, published until 1966, ten years after Brecht’s death. They are unmentioned in the 1300 pages of his collected theatrical writings and notes. A note to GW says that the first four of them were submitted to a Munich publisher, presumably about when Münsterer saw them, but were not accepted. To judge from the typescripts in the Brecht Archive (one of
The Beggar
and two of each of the others)
The Catch, The Wedding
, and
Driving Out a Devil
were at one stage grouped together, in that order, with a view to possible publication.

The Wedding
was renamed, literally,
The Petit-Bourgeois Wedding
on its appearance in 1966 (rather as
The Seven Deadly Sins
, Brecht’s ballet with Kurt Weill, originally performed under that title, had been renamed
The Seven Deadly Sins of the Petit-Bourgeois
by the time of its publication in 1959). Without going into the social-ethical implications of such changes, it can be said that the words ‘Petit-Bourgeois’ (
’Kleinbürger
-) have been inserted on the title page of one of the typescripts in Brecht’s handwriting. This does not, however, appear to be the finally corrected copy, and omits the vital noise of the collapsing bed at the end of the play.

¹
See p. 391.

Bloomsbury Methuen Drama
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This edition first published in Great Britain in 1994

Reissued with a new cover in 1998 by Methuen Drama by arrangement with Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main

This collection first published in Great Britain in 1970 by Methuen & Co. Ltd

Methuen Drama series editor for Bertolt Brecht: Tom Kuhn

Translation copyright for all the plays and texts by Brecht © Bertolt-Brecht-Erben 1970

Introduction and Notes © Methuen & Co. Ltd 1970

Copyright in the original plays as follows:

Baal
: Original work entitled
Baal

© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1953

Drums in the Night:
Original work entitled
Trommeln in der Nacht

© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1953

In the Jungle of Cities:
Original work entitled
Im Dickicht der Städte

© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1953

The Life of Edward II of England:
Original work entitled
Leben Eduards des

Zweiten von England

© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1953

A Respectable Wedding:
Original work entitled
Die Kleinbürgerhochzeit

© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1966

The Beggar or The Dead Dog:
Original work entitled
Der Bettler oder Der Tote Hund

© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1966

Driving Out a Devil:
Original work entitled
Er treibt einen Teufel aus

© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1966

Lux in Tenebris:
Original work entitled
Lux in Tenebris

© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1966

The Catch:
Original work entitled
Der Fischzug

© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben / Suhrkamp Verlag 1966

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eISBN-13: 978-1-4081-6207-1