The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Bertolt Brecht · a play in fifteen scenes · first written in Danish exile in 1938 and first staged at the Zurich Schauspielhaus in 1943 · scored on the Berlin version, Brecht’s third, completed in 1955 and 1956 and first staged by the Berliner Ensemble in January 1957, after his death · scored on Brecht’s German, read from knowledge, with John Willett’s English for sense; no text in hand, German quoted only where its words are certain, with a plain English rendering beneath, and no published translation quoted
Mode
Epic history play; a chronicle of discovery and recantation with the outcome of every scene announced before it is played
Mythos
A Faust without a devil and a Prometheus who gives the fire back: the founding story of modern science’s bargain with power, built in the action
Phase
From Padua in 1609 to the Italian border in 1637, with the fourteenth scene running from 1633 to 1642, so that the last scene stands earlier in time than the end of the one before it
Presentation
Drama; fifteen scenes, each headed by a short verse caption that names place, date and outcome; a ballad-singer at a carnival; the last scene often cut in performance
Register
Argument, comedy and chronicle, rising to the cold wonder of the night at the telescope, the robing of the Pope and the terror of the bell
Scale
One man’s thirty years among the Venetian arsenal, the Medici court, the Collegium Romanum, the Vatican and a frontier town; the turn of an age shown through a lens-grinder’s trade
Governing Proposition
A teacher of mathematics in Padua, greedy for milk, wine and argument, turns a telescope on the sky, finds that the old heavens do not exist, and spends thirty years first proving it and then, before the instruments of the Inquisition, denying it; he lives on, a prisoner in his own house, and finishes in secret the book a pupil carries over the border. The wager of the play is that knowledge is a social act and not a private possession, that a truth found and then surrendered to power does more harm than a truth never found, and that a stage which tells each outcome in advance can show an audience how such a surrender is made.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Leben des Galilei exists in three versions, and the play’s own history is part of what it argues. Brecht wrote the first in Danish exile in 1938; it was first staged at the Zurich Schauspielhaus in 1943. The second is English: the Galileo he made with Charles Laughton, staged in Beverly Hills and in New York in 1947, and rewritten after Hiroshima. The third is the Berlin version, completed in 1955 and 1956 and first staged by the Berliner Ensemble in January 1957, five months after Brecht’s death in August 1956. It is the text of the collected editions and of almost every production since, and it is the one scored here.
There are fifteen scenes. Each is headed by a short verse caption that names the place, the date and the outcome before the scene is played. The action runs from Padua in 1609 to the Italian border in 1637, through the Venetian arsenal, Florence and the Medici court, the Collegium Romanum and Cardinal Bellarmine’s house in Rome, a market place at carnival, the Vatican and a country house near Florence. The fourteenth scene spans 1633 to 1642, so that the fifteenth, set in 1637, stands earlier in time than the end of the one before it.
Around the historical man Brecht set invented persons, and they carry the argument: Andrea Sarti, the housekeeper’s son; Ludovico Marsili, a suitor; the little monk; Vanni the ironfounder. Galileo’s daughter Virginia, historically the nun Sister Maria Celeste, is made a girl engaged to be married. The play keeps the record of the discoveries and of the trial and invents the people through whom they are paid for.
Movement II
The first scene opens on appetite. Galileo wants his milk and his bath, and before breakfast he teaches the housekeeper’s boy the motion of the earth with a washstand and an apple. He announces a new age. The man’s pleasure in food and his pleasure in thought are one pleasure, and the play will hold him to that: the body that enjoys the lesson is the body that will later be shown the instruments.
In the second scene, at the Venetian arsenal, he sells the Republic the telescope as his own invention. He needs the salary. This Galileo trades truth for comfort from the start, and the scene is not a digression but a premise; the recantation is already priced in it.
The third scene is the night of 10 January 1610. Galileo and Sagredo are at the telescope, and they find that the stars around Jupiter move, and that there is no crystal sphere to hold them. It is the play’s height of wonder, and the method keeps it cold: what rises in the scene is a finding, not a feeling. Sagredo’s warning belongs to it. A man who has seen this will want to say so, and the play has already shown what he will want more.
Movement III
In Florence, in the fourth scene, the court philosophers refuse to look through the telescope. They argue in Latin instead, while a child fights over a model. Refusal is shown as a method, and the play’s own form answers it: the captions tell the outcome so that the audience will look at the how and the why, as the philosophers will not. When plague comes, Galileo will not leave his observations; it is the courage the recantation will later betray.
The middle of the play is economical: the Collegium Romanum, Bellarmine’s ball, where the warning is given, and the temptation of a sympathetic pope. The eighth scene is its centre. The little monk tells Galileo of his parents in the Campagna, peasants for whom the old heavens give meaning to their labour; take the order of the spheres away and their toil is for nothing. Galileo answers that what they need is not the old heavens but a way out of the labour. Each side’s best case is put, and the scene shows cosmology to be social order.
In the tenth scene a ballad-singer at carnival sings the new doctrine as comedy, and a masked Galileo goes in procession: the teaching has reached the market place, and the people have heard it. The scene is loosely made, and it shows a reach the eighth has already argued; but it is one of the few places where the people the play speaks for are seen at all.
Movement IV
In the twelfth scene the Pope is robed while the Inquisitor talks. Piece by piece the vestments go on, and piece by piece his resistance thins. No argument is won on the stage; the costume wins it. It is the play’s image of power, and it is made of silence and cloth.
The thirteenth scene is the terror of the play. Galileo’s pupils wait for the bell that will mark the recantation. Five o’clock passes in silence and they rejoice: he has held. Then the bell, and then the reading of the recantation. Galileo’s rebuke to Andrea is one line:
“Unglücklich das Land, das Helden nötig hat”
(unhappy the land that needs heroes).
The line can be taken as wisdom or as an excuse, and the play lets it stand as both. In the first version the recantation was framed as cunning, a survivor’s way of keeping his work alive. The Berlin text keeps the line and then, in the next scene, has the man condemn himself. The question it opens, whether Galileo is right about heroes or right about himself, is the question every production must answer, and the text supports either answer.
Movement V
The fourteenth scene spans nine years. Galileo is old and a prisoner, in a country house near Florence, with his goose at the window. He has gone on working in secret, and when Andrea comes he gives him the hidden manuscript, the Discorsi. Then he gives his verdict on himself: that he has betrayed his profession, and that a science which surrenders its findings to power has made its practitioners available to any master. The speech is delivered to the audience over Andrea’s head, and it is a lecture; it is also the disclosure the whole play has prepared.
This is the graft of 1945 onto 1938. A play built to show a cunning survivor is turned, in its penultimate scene, into his condemnation, and the bomb stands behind it, carried by allusion: the moral frame in which the scientists and the bomb would be judged is set here, in the Renaissance. Played as dialectic, Galileo right about heroes and wrong about himself, the two scenes hold together. The seam shows.
The fifteenth scene goes back in time. In 1637, at a frontier town, Andrea takes the Discorsi over the border while boys whisper about a witch. The scene is often cut, and the play can lose it; but its place in the chronology is its meaning. The book is out while the man is still a prisoner, and the work survives its maker’s betrayal: the first version’s hope, kept at the end of the version that condemns him.
Act III · The Twelve
The epic form chooses scenes rather than a chain of causes, and the subtractive test bites at the edges. The spine resists it. The appetite of the first scene, milk, a bath, a boy taught with a washstand and an apple, is required by the recantation of the thirteenth; the telescope sold to Venice in the second as his own invention is required, since this Galileo trades truth for comfort from the start; the plague scene, where he will not leave his observations, is the courage the recantation betrays. The middle, the sixth, seventh and ninth scenes, is economical. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the fifteenth scene, a coda the play can lose and often does, and the carnival of the tenth, which shows a reach the eighth has already argued.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Knowledge is a social act and not a private possession; a truth found and then surrendered to power does more harm than a truth never found, because it teaches power how to buy the finders; and the scientist who serves knowledge for its own sake has made himself available to any master. The play discloses more than it states. In the eighth scene the little monk’s parents in the Campagna need the old heavens because those heavens give meaning to their labour, and Galileo answers that what they need is a way out of the labour: cosmology is shown to be social order. The pleasure-loving body and the cowardly will are shown as one appetite. Held below 9 because the indictment of the fourteenth scene is voiced as lecture more than found in action.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The method works against transport, and the play’s elevations are cold and intellectual, which the axis allows. They recur. The third scene, the night of 10 January 1610, Galileo and Sagredo at the telescope finding that the stars around Jupiter move and that there is no crystal sphere, is the height of wonder. The twelfth, the Pope argued down by the Inquisitor while he is robed piece by piece, his resistance thinning as the vestments go on, is grandeur and dread in one stage image. The thirteenth is the terror: the disciples’ joy as five o’clock passes in silence, then the bell, then the recantation read out. Between these the register is argument, comedy and chronicle, and it stays there for long stretches.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. Brecht took a historical episode and made it the founding myth of modern science’s bargain with power: the moment at which, as the play argues, knowledge and the people parted. The structure bears it: the rise, with the telescope and the new age announced in the first scene; the warning, from Sagredo and at Bellarmine’s ball; the temptation of a sympathetic pope; the fall in a recantation; and the long afterlife of a man who lived on and knew what he had done. It is a Faust without a devil and a Prometheus who gives the fire back. The particular stays particular: geese, wine, a salary dispute, a lens-grinder’s trade. Held at the gate because the bomb, load-bearing in the Berlin text, is carried by allusion rather than built into the Renaissance action.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The inheritance is the German history play of Goethe and Schiller, in which the great man’s conscience is the drama, and Brecht’s own epic theatre of the 1920s and 1930s. The turn is real: a history play whose hero is denied the heroic death, whose recantation was first framed as cunning and is condemned, in the Berlin text, by the man himself; captions that kill suspense so that the audience judges the how and the why; a hero whose sensuality is the measure of his science and of his cowardice alike. The cost was paid twice, in exile and in rewriting the play against its own first conclusion. Held below the gate because this is the most classical of Brecht’s major plays, the one most often taken in by identification: a swerve from Schiller, not a reorganisation of the theatre.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Change the form and the play loses part of what it knows. The verse captions announce each outcome, so the scenes become experiments whose result is given and whose mechanism is shown: the form is the method of Galileo’s own science, look and see why, and it asks the audience to do what the court philosophers of the fourth scene refuse to do. Thirty years in fifteen scenes let appetite and age do their work on a man. The inverted chronology at the end sends the book over the border while the man is still a prisoner, so that the work survives its maker’s betrayal. Held where it is because much of the play’s power, the old man at the window with his goose and his hidden manuscript, is gained by identification, which the epic frame was meant to forbid.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over some seventy years of the Berlin text and over eighty of the play. The readings multiply and do not cancel: a play of the scientist’s responsibility, read anew at each crisis of science and power, from the bomb to genetics and computing; an allegory of the intellectual under dictatorship, to which critics have brought Brecht’s own conduct before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1947 and in East Berlin after June 1953; a study of appetite and its place in thought; a document of revision, three versions in which an author argues with his own conclusion. Its central question stays open on the stage: is Galileo right in the thirteenth scene about heroes, or in the fourteenth when he condemns himself? Productions choose, and the text supports either.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The field is the drama of the twentieth century in German and in Europe. The force: the play made the history play an instrument of argument about the present, made science a subject for the serious stage, and set the moral frame in which the story of the scientists and the bomb has since been told. Held where it is because Brecht’s reorganisation of the theatre is carried more by the epic plays and by his theory than by this one, the most traditional of his major works, and its reach outruns its force a little. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it is among the most produced of Brecht’s plays in German and in English, in Laughton’s version of 1947, in the Berliner Ensemble’s staging of 1957, in Joseph Losey’s film of 1975, and in translations by Howard Brenton and David Hare for the London stage.
Score: 8.5 / 10
For a text, the survival of the text. The Berlin version is about seventy years old and the play’s first version about eighty-eight. The text survives whole, in a settled form, and the earlier versions survive beside it as versions, not as loss. Presence has been continuous: steady production in Germany and abroad, a set text in German schools, widely taught in English, translated widely. Its surface is fixed in part to its moment, the bomb and the Cold War, but the play has outlived those conditions and is read as more pertinent with each later turn of science. Its presence is wide but not the widest of its span, and nothing is added for fame.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Scored on Brecht’s German and on its dramaturgy. The prose is lean and gestic: speech built to be shown, with the attitude in the syntax. The scenes of argument are superb in their making: the fourth scene’s refusal to look, conducted in the court philosophers’ Latin while a child fights over a model; the eighth scene’s exchange with the little monk, where each side’s best case is put; the twelfth scene’s robing, an argument made of costume and silence; the thirteenth scene’s bell. The captions are compact and exact. Charged for the fourteenth scene’s self-indictment, a speech delivered to the audience over Andrea’s head; for the carnival of the tenth, loosely made; and for comic business at court and curia that is sometimes broad.
Score: 8.7 / 10
One law governs most of the play: knowledge is made by bodies with appetites inside an economy, and what it does depends on whom it serves. The two most distant elements obey it: the washstand demonstration for a boy in the first scene and the robing of the Pope in the twelfth are both lessons in how a world-picture is held, one by a child’s eyes, one by power in vestments. The ballad-singer’s carnival, the Venetian arsenal, the Medici court’s refusal and the peasants of the Campagna all fall under it. What strains the law is the graft of 1945 onto 1938: a play built to show a cunning survivor is turned, in its penultimate scene, into his condemnation. Played as dialectic it holds, but the seam shows.
Score: 8.4 / 10
For a single play, much is held and integrated. Consciousness: Galileo’s pleasure, curiosity, fear and self-contempt. The family: Virginia’s marriage to Ludovico Marsili sacrificed, the housekeeper and her son Andrea. Labour and economy: the Venetian arsenal, the salary he bargains for, the cloth merchants, the peasants and their oil, Vanni the ironfounder, who sees what the new astronomy means for trade. The state: Venice, Florence, the Papal States, the Inquisition. The sacred: the old heavens as the order of meaning, the little monk’s faith. History: the turn of an age, announced in the first scene and paid for in the thirteenth. The natural order: the moons of Jupiter, the sunspots, floating bodies. Held in one argument; a play’s span keeps the people mostly at the edges, in a carnival and a monk’s report.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and The Made at 8.7, then The Bottomless Well at 8.6. A text whole and settled, its earlier versions surviving beside it, in continuous production for seven decades; a disclosure that knowledge is social and that a truth surrendered to power teaches power how to buy its finders; Brecht’s lean and gestic German and scenes of argument superbly made, the refusal to look, the little monk, the robing, the bell; and a central question, heroes or self-condemnation, that the stage has not closed.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.1: the fifteenth scene is a coda the play can lose, and the carnival of the tenth restates the eighth. The Swerve at 8.3: the most classical of Brecht’s major plays, a swerve from Schiller rather than a reorganisation of the theatre. The Sublime at 8.3, where the elevations are cold and rationed, with long stretches of argument and chronicle between them. The Inner Law at 8.4, for the seam between the thirteenth scene and the fourteenth.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Unconcealment at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition meet it exactly at 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.3 falls short, for a play that turns from the classical history play without reorganising the stage. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below 8.1, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. The aggregate, 8.5, holds the work in Tier IV in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Bertolt Brecht’s Leben des Galilei, scored as the single play, a text for performance, in the Berlin version: Brecht’s third, completed in 1955 and 1956 and first staged by the Berliner Ensemble in January 1957, after his death in August 1956; the text of the collected editions and of almost every production since. Two earlier versions are context, not the unit: the first, written in Danish exile in 1938 and first staged at the Zurich Schauspielhaus in 1943; and the English Galileo made with Charles Laughton, staged in Beverly Hills and New York in 1947 and rewritten after Hiroshima. Every score is judged on Brecht’s German. No text was in hand, nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. German is quoted on this page only where its words are certain, which is one line, and beneath it stands a plain English rendering in parentheses, made for this page and not taken from any published translation; everything else is paraphrased. Translation · John Willett’s English in the Methuen edition (1980) was used for sense. It is not quoted, and nothing in it is charged or credited to the play. The German is known here only in part; the play is known in its structure, sequence and argument scene by scene, and in its main speeches. References are by scene. Performances and Joseph Losey’s film of 1975 are evidence of the play’s life, not the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the director and leading actor of the first Berlin production, the running time of a full staging, the exact wording of Galileo’s phrases in the third and fourteenth scenes, the identity of the bell in the thirteenth, and the conscious relation of later plays on the physicists and the bomb to this one, are not given.