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, through the enactment of such psychology and toward the inevitability of confrontation and interaction of the ideas
individuals hold of what properly constitutes the human community
on one hand, and of themselves as members of that community on one the other. Brecht elaborates this idea in a discussion of character as an adumbration, not determinant, of dramatic structure. It is the idea of the A effect, or alienation effect, the process whereby a scene may "a...