Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) (7 page)

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 heavens, 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.