Bertolt Brech's Galileo
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The purpose of this research is to examine the play Galileo by Bertolt Brecht. The plan of the research will be to analyze the thematic and dramatic structure of the play with particular emphasis on its relationship to Brecht's politics. As appropriate, for the reason that Brecht's politics and his conception of what the theatre ought to be emerge as inextricably bound up with his plays, the research will discuss how the dialectic of the play fits into the scheme of dialectical materialism on one hand, and reflects a genre category of modern European drama on the other. Galileo is structured around the crucial period in Galileo's life when he discovered that the earth moves around the sun and not the other way around, published his results, and recanted his findings under pressure from the Church, which held at the time that the earth was the center of the universe. Brecht builds his play around his vision of Galileo's attitudes and choices at critical points in this process, in relation to his colleagues and students, sundry Church officials, his daughter Virginia, and his protege Andrea. The action of Galileo straddles mythical/poetic and historical time, and Brecht's view of history needs to be accepted for mythopoetic purposes. To put it another way, he manipulates history in the play by treating it ironically so as to get at meaning, psychology, social truth. The basis for the attitudes the characters enact reaches beyond individual psychology, thro
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llett quotes Brecht's statement about uncovering Marxist attitudes in his plays:
When I read Marx's Capital I understood my plays.
Naturally I want to see this book widely circulated. It
wasn't of course that I found I had unconsciously written a
whole pile of Marxist plays; but this man Marx was the only
spectator for my plays I'd ever come across. For a man with
interests like his must of necessity be interested in my
plays, not because they are so intelligent but because he
is they are something for him to think about. This happened
because I was as hard up for opinions as for money, and had
the same attitude to both: that they are there not to be
hoarded but to be spent (Willett 23 4).
Brecht's approach to making drama requires the tension of a significant moment of history in order to make a poetic statement of moral and political importance. In one sense, Galileo is the working out of the dialectic of progress and the advancement of science, and it makes a statement for the value of changing the course of history. We can easily say that because the real Galileo lived, the world itself lives differently than it might otherwise have. That Ga
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3582
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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