Free Brecht Collected Plays: 5: Life of Galileo; Mother Courage and Her Children (World Classics) by Bertolt Brecht Page B

didn’t you pick a dead language or theology? That’s easier.
Sees Mrs Sarti
. Right, come along on Tuesday morning.
Ludovico leaves
.
    GALILEO : Don’t give me that look. I accepted him.
    MRS SARTI : Because I caught your eye in time. The procurator of the university is out there.
    GALILEO : Show him in, he matters. There may be 500 scudi in this. I wouldn’t have to bother with pupils.
Mrs Sarti shows in the procurator. Galileo has finished dressing, meanwhile jotting down figures on a piece of paper
.
    GALILEO : Good morning. Lend us half a scudo.
The procurator digs a coin out of his purse and Galileo gives it to Sarti
. Sarti, tell Andrea to go to the spectacle-maker’s and get two lenses: there’s the prescription.
Exit Mrs Sarti with the paper
.
    PROCURATOR : I have come in connection with your application for a rise in salary to 1000 scudi. I regret that I cannot recommend it to the university. As you know, courses in mathematics do not attract new students. Mathematics, so to speak, is an unproductive art. Not that our Republic doesn’t esteem it most highly. It may not be so essential as philosophy or so useful as theology, but it nonetheless offers infinite pleasures to its adepts.
    GALILEO
busy with his papers:
My dear fellow, I can’t manage on 500 scudi.
    PROCURATOR : But, Mr Galilei, your week consists of two two-hour lectures. Given your outstanding reputation you can certainly get plenty of pupils who can afford private lessons. Haven’t you got private pupils?
    GALILEO : Too many, sir. I teach and I teach, and when am I supposed to learn? God help us, I’m not half as sharp as those gentlemen in the philosophy department. I’m stupid. I understand absolutely nothing. So I’m compelled to fill the gaps in my knowledge. And when am I supposed to do that? When am I to get on with my research? Sir, my branch of knowledge is still avid to know. The greatest problems still find us with nothing but hypotheses to go on. Yet we keep asking ourselves for proofs. How am I to provide them if I can only maintain my home by having to take any thickhead who can afford the money and din it into him that parallel lines meet at infinity?
    PROCURATOR : Don’t forget that even if the Republic pays less well than certain princes it does guarantee freedom of research. In Padua we even admit Protestants to our lectures. And give them doctors’ degrees too. In Mr Cremonini’s case we not only failed to hand him over to the Inquisition when he was proved, proved, Mr Galilei – to have made irreligious remarks, but actually granted him a rise in salary. As far as Holland Venice is known as the republic where the Inquisition has no say. That should mean something to you, being an astronomer, that’s to say operating in a field where for some time now the doctrines of the church have hardly been treated with proper respect.
    GALILEO : You people handed Mr Giordano Bruno over to Rome. Because he was propagating the ideas of Copernicus.
    PROCURATOR : Not because he was propagating the ideas of Mr Copernicus, which anyway are wrong, but because he was not a Venetian citizen and had no regular position here. So you needn’t drag in the man they burned. Incidentally, however free we are, I wouldn’t go around openly citing a name like his, which is subject to the express anathema of the church: not even here, not even here.
    GALILEO : Your protection of freedom of thought is pretty good business, isn’t it? By showing how everywhere else the Inquisition prevails and burns people, you get good teachers cheap for this place. You make up for your attitude to the Inquisition by paying lower salaries than anyone.
    PROCURATOR : That’s most unfair. What use would it be to you to have limitless spare time for research if any ignorant monk in the Inquisition could just put a ban on your thoughts? Every rose has its thorn, Mr Galilei, and every ruler has his monks.
    GALILEO : So what’s the good of free research without free