The Life of Galileo

Abstract

As a subject of literature, the life of Galileo Galilei, the physicist, astronomer and mathematician, who was required by the Inquisition in 1633 to recant his heretical arguments in support of the Copernican opinion that the earth revolved around the sun, would seem to lend itself equally well to heroic or tragic treatment. In popular memory he is celebrated as an embodiment of heroic stubbornness who supposedly bent to the superior power of the Holy See only to retract his recantation at the earliest opportunity with the famous words, ‘Eppursi muove’ (‘Yet it does move’). On the other hand there is congenial material for the tragedian in the humiliation of the great man at the hands of a church to which he remained deeply attached, in Galileo’s isolation, loss of freedom and the growing sadness of his last years. In the successive versions of Brecht’s play on this subject there is a shift in emphasis away from a heroic treatment of an individual life towards one in which the individual provides the focus for a study of the historical process, a process that cannot be confined within the limits of pessimistic or optimistic literary modes. The intellectual and emotional complexity of Brecht’s final version can best be appreciated by considering the stages by which he arrived at it.