The Life of Galileo Bertolt Brecht

The Life of Galileo Bertolt Brecht Foreword Two SCENES, numbered 5 and 10 in the original version, are omitted from this edition of The Life of Galileo to reduce it to manageable length for students. A reader can follow the theme of the play clearly enough without them; on the other hand, what they contribute to its background, in the panic-stricken atmosphere of the plague and the wild hilarity of the carnival, needs stage presentation, even more than most of the other scenes, for its full effect. Like nearly all plays, this one is written to he seen and heard. The best way to treat the text is to give it a first reading straight through, trying to visualize the scenes as they follow each other. This should give a clear impression of its main intention. The commentary will then fill in the information that is needed to understand it more fully. For miscellaneous information in the commentary and textual notes, the editor is indebted chiefly to Ronald Grey’s Brecht in the ‘Writers and Critics’ series (Oliver & Boyd, 1961), to The Copernican Revolution by Thomas S. Kuhn (Random House, New York, 1959), and to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and for some useful suggestions to David McCutchion, Reader in Comparative Literature at the University of Jadavpur. A.G. S.

A NOTE ON BERTOLT BRECHT was born at Augsberg in 1898. He was educated, like most middle-class German boys, at primary and secondary school, and studied science for less than a year at Munich University before he was called up in 1918 for service as a medical orderly in the First World War. He came home in 1919 to a Germany that was defeated and badly disorganized. From the beginning his sympathies were with the communists. Even more .certainly, if we are to judge from his work, he was against the rising Nazi
BERTOLT BRECHT

movement; but he was a creative artist more than a politician-Like Shakespeare, Brecht was a man of the theatre from the beginning of his career. In 1920 he was a kind of dramatic