Hamlet and The Life of Galileo

Abstract

The early 1930s were years of commitment and turmoil for Brecht. With the Lehrstucke he was experimenting with revolutionary forms in which to present his new subject matter. He lost his legal battle for artistic control of the Threepenny Opera film, which premiered shortly after his own stage production of Man Equals Man in 1931. Following successful productions of Mahagonny and The Mother in the same year, the film Kuhle Wampe was banned until changes were made, the government-approved version finally opening in Berlin on 30 May 1932. During this period a radio broadcast of Saint Joan of the Stockyards was aired. Late in 1932 and into 1933 Brecht was attending lectures given by Karl Korsch; these led to the workshops on dialectical materialism held in Brecht's home. But on 28 February 1933, the day after the Reichstag fire, Brecht, Helene Weigel, and their son Stefan left for Prague, beginning their long period of exile; their daughter Barbara soon joined them. In addition to other work, Brecht spent the rest of the 1930s writing and producing when possible plays which dealt specifically with the new problems in Europe: The Roundheads and the Pointed Heads (1932), The Seven Deadly Sins of the Bourgeoisie (1933), Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (1937-38), and Senora Carrar's Rifles (1937-38). The farcical critique of judgment presented in Man Equals Man and other early works takes on a specific target in these plays; they are no less critical than the earlier pieces, but the element of self-criticism is suppressed a tendency Brecht struggled to overcome. This period is framed by Brecht's radio adaptation oi Hamlet, aired in 1931, and the first version of The Life of Galileo, initially entitled The Earth Moves, written late in 1938. In this paper I want to discuss the correspondences between Shakespeare's Hamlet and Brecht's Life of Galileo not for the sake of the correspondences themselves but to argue that Brecht's radio adaptation of Hamlet was only his first adaptation of Shakespeare's play; Galileo was his second. There are many coincidental paral-