Life of Galileo

"First of all, there are three different versions of the Brecht play. That’s what is so fascinating. Brecht creates this play in three different contexts in the 30s, 40s and 50s. As a piece of interpretation, as a demonstration that there are many different Galileos that can be different kinds of object lessons, it’s amazing. There are many inaccuracies. He takes license and liberty. Galileo has two daughters who are sent to a convent way too early for the older one to be thwarted in her marriage aspirations by Galileo’s increasingly controversial reputation, as Brecht would have us believe. But that’s a perfect dramatic move, so one can forgive Brecht for deciding that he has to do that. And who knows exactly how much he knew about the life of the daughters? After all, it’s only very recently, thanks to Dava Sobel’s work , that we know a lot about Galileo’s eldest daughter Virginia (Suor Maria Celeste). Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Nonetheless, I like Brecht. When you put aside both the deliberate decisions that he makes, the omissions and alterations and the things he just didn’t know in the way that a historian would, he does capture some things about Galileo as a person. He loved life. When the actor Topol played him, he really embodied this vision Brecht has of Galileo as a very human figure. That’s what theatre can do, it can bring that humanity to life in the same way that good fiction does. It’s also a performance and I think that Galileo and his world were naturally quite theatrical. Galileo was a contemporary of Shakespeare , after all. Fundamentally, Brecht recognized that Galileo is not just of his times, but for the ages. As times change, we learn different things from him—and Brecht did. That’s why he kept rewriting the play. One version is for the Weimar Republic , on the eve of Nazi Germany , and as Brecht leaves that world. Another version is about the social responsibility of the scientist after the dropping of the atomic bomb. Another version is in the midst of the Cold War . By then Brecht is thinking about the American reaction to his own communism in the McCarthy era and becoming increasingly interested in migrating to Russia to explore these issues. In all of them, he can bring Galileo with him. In many ways, it’s a great starting point for understanding Galileo. You can watch the version with Topol online. It used to be one of these bootleg things that was hard to find, but now nothing is hard to find anymore. It gets you into a lot of the issues, even if it flattens the complexity, because it’s trying to make these simple dichotomies between good and bad. But even in the simplicity, the fact he changes the punch line—which version of Brecht’s play are we watching?—means you have to ask yourself what meaning we should extract from Galileo’s trial and his response to it. There is a great moment in Brecht’s play when Galileo returns to Rome in the midst of Carnival. His papal adversaries observe that he’s not wearing a mask. In making this observation, Brecht reveals something fundamental about Galileo."