Especially during the formative years leading up to his emergence as a playwright with Widowers' Houses (1892), the course of Shaw's career was deeply influenced by his friend and self-proclaimed mentor, William Archer. Archer, born in the same year as Shaw (1856), became one of the foremost early translators of Ibsen's dramas and, next to Shaw, their most vigorous advocate in the English theatre of the late nineteenth century. He first came across Shaw, at the age of 26, in the British Museum Reading Room, where he noticed both the pale young man with the bright red beard and “the odd combination of authors whom he used to study - for I saw him day after day poring over Karl Marx's Das Kapital and an orchestral score of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.” Not long afterwards, early in 1884, Archer was hired by Edmund Yates's World as that newspaper's drama critic, and he soon persuaded his publisher to take on his unemployed friend as well, to serve as the paper's art critic. Some time later, Archer recalls, “the post of musical critic fell vacant, and I secured it for Shaw by the simple process of telling Yates the truth: namely, that he was at once the most competent and most brilliant writer on music then living in England.” Shaw himself could not have put it better in one of his prefaces.

O'Neill's own detailed record of his living and writing from 1924 to 1943, the Work Diary, now part of the O'Neill collection at Yale, makes possible the following account of the vast Cycle project: how it was conceived and developed, and how it eventually ended. Although much manuscript material relating to the plays was destroyed, their plots can be reconstructed from scenarios and other notes also preserved at Yale. Outlines of all the plays in the nine-play Cycle are given here in the sequence of their conception as part of the series. They are followed by a summary of the four plays outlined by O'Neill in October and November 1940 to replace plays one and two, actually written between 1935 and 1937, but later destroyed. The four gave the plan its final form - a Cycle of eleven plays.

In a moment of crisis in the 1890s masculine control of the theatre as an institution was shaken by the efforts of insurgent women and a few male sympathizers. Bernard Shaw, writing about the London theatre of 1894 - the annus mirabilis of the New Woman - described the importance of that revolt with a clearsightedness unusual, perhaps unique, among men of the theatre. Shaw declares in the preface he wrote for William Archer's Theatrical "World" of 1894, assessing developments of that year in the London stage:

By his seventieth birthday, Bernard Shaw was one of the most famous people in the world. Yet despite intense scrutiny, perhaps no other figure of his stature and visibility has been so thoroughly misunderstood. The only Nobel laureate also to win an Academy Award (for the screenplay of Pygmalion), he was recognized as much for his wit and his eccentric personality as for his writings. Certainly the celebrity made unfailing good copy as he voiced opinions on everything from European dictators to childraising. But for too long he insisted on caricaturing himself as a clown and buffoon. Late in life, he lamented that he had been all too persuasive, the overexposed G. B. S. figure trivializing views of both man and artist. Then, too, there had always been an undercurrent of antagonism toward the selfproclaimed genius who insisted on the satirist's right to skewer societal foibles - that insistence marked him as guilty of a disconcerting detachment from the mass of his fellow human beings according to his detractors, a detachment noticeable in the personal sphere as well.

Although very much a participant in the secular fervor of his times, Bernard Shaw, like his creation Andrew Undershaft, was also a confirmed mystic, and gradually this mysticism led him to a long-range solution to human problems, a solution he called the Life Force and a philosophy he called Creative Evolution. Over time, Shaw's plays became less social diatribes and more parables addressing what he saw as the basic human paradox: by the time the human mind begins to achieve its potential, the human body is ready for the dustbin. Creative Evolution, and its concurrent human development, were therefore based on a premise that that which furthered the evolution of the species toward the true development of the intellect was good, and that which hindered it was bad.

From the end of World War I to the onset of the Great Depression marked the most dynamic period in the history of the American stage. Over the course of this era, the theatre experienced unprecedented growth. Expansion, stimulated by mounting economic prosperity and a burgeoning urban, middle-class population, resulted in an increased demand for theatrical entertainment. Demand sparked competition and an openness to invention and change, forcing the theatrical establishment to vie with new emerging talents and innovative approaches for audiences and critical attention. O'Neill's career, which began on the cusp of this theatrical Renaissance, was impacted by theatre's expansionist tendencies and the prevailing tensions between the forces of tradition and those of change. A survey of the existing conditions and innovative trends manifest in this milieu illuminates O'Neill's artistic and commercial success in the theatre of his time.

On 2 February 1920 Eugene O'Neill saw his first major play, Beyond the Horizon, open at the Morosco. It was his first opening and first performance in a mainstream theatre. Beyond was about the thirtieth play he had finished since he began writing plays in 1913; he wrote it early in 1918 when he was twenty-nine. When it opened two years later, New York was in the throes of a lethal influenza epidemic, and the opening was an unpublicized “special matinee.” Late in rehearsals, O'Neill took over direction from the lead actor, but despite all efforts, despaired of the production. Nevertheless, an audience came and accepted the play as a serious and absorbing work, and reviewers admired it. Though it is no great compliment, Beyond was clearly the best play yet written by an American and would win O'Neill the first of four Pulitzer Prizes. The production ran 144 performances and brought O'Neill over $6,000 which made him, at thirty-one, finally independent of his father's purse-strings.

In 1890, before he even began his career as a playwright, Shaw identified what he considered to be the defining quality for a new, non-traditional form of drama. From Aristotle on, action had been the core of drama; now Ibsen offered a radically different model. In The Quintessence of Ibsenism Shaw presented Ibsen as a socialist and a realist, whose naturalistic drama exposed all collective abstractions as damaging illusions, and promoted the “individual will” against “the tyranny of ideals.” But beyond this, the key factor was that instead of the standard final-Act climax, Ibsen's characters sat down and talked. The clash of opinion replaced physical conflict, so that a play's resolution was the outcome of discussion.

As with so much of Shaw's writing, all this may seem an idiosyncratic distortion of its subject, but reveals a great deal about its author. The pamphlet was published in 1892, shortly before his first play Widowers' Houses appeared, and served as a manifesto for his theatrical aims. When Shaw delivered it as one of the lectures for a Fabian Society series on "Socialism in Contemporary Literature" two years earlier "The Quintessence of Ibsenism" had a more immediate target; and its politics were deliberately provocative in attacking the collectivist beliefs of other leading Fabians, such as Annie Besant (who had chaired Shaw's lecture) and Sidney Webb. However, the switch from action to discussion, that Shaw detected in Ibsen's work, corresponds with the fundamental Fabian approach to social change.

This essay is concerned with the myth of Galileo and, thus, with his image as a hero and martyr. It does not endeavor to state who Galileo was or what he did, but deals rather with people's expectations of who he was; in other words how his image and the image of his science have evolved from his time to the present day.

Galileo's great qualities and skills as a scientist are well known, but he was also an accomplished writer, wielding his sharp pen as a major protagonist in an age of upheaval, and he was the most famous martyr of science. His fate is, therefore, an endless source of material for an epic, enough to satisfy every age's demand for hero worship. This is why Bertolt Brecht chose to write his famous play Galileo.

It is nothing new that Galileo has been a subject of worship since his own day. It is agreed among Galilean scholars that the Galileo story is often distorted by popular as well as scholarly literature. Moreover, Galileo is naturally idolized. If we cannot, or do not wish to, safeguard historical description from circumstantial influences or fashions, let us at least try to explore the twilight zone between "true" history and myth.

Galileo's life and works, like Gaul, has generally been divided into three parts. There is his work on mechanics and local motion (with the science of the strength of bodies grudgingly admitted), his work on astronomy and Copernicanism, and, finally, his relations and tribulations with the Catholic Church. Occasionally, some scholars under the anachronistic rubric of methodology have attempted to tie the two scientific parts together to obtain a more coherent picture.

In the space of this essay, I cannot overcome this tripartite division that the centuries have sanctioned. I can, however, sketch a picture of Galileo that will be a step toward this goal. It seems to me that Galileo had only a few basic conceptions that directed his life and work in all these three areas. His first belief concerned the role of the properly thinking and working individual scientist as being able to obtain knowledge and certainty. This belief showed up in his writings about the role of the scientific elite individual, who saw and understood things that were not seen by the masses, or, especially, by groups dedicated to the authority of Aristotle. It also seems to lie at the heart of his thoughts about Biblical exegesis. This individualism is apparent in Galileo's texts by his ubiquitous and consistent use of the first person singular "I" ("io") and the use of proper names or descriptions to talk about insights, discoveries, and all the accomplishments of good science.

INTRODUCTION

On the second day of the Two New Sciences the three interlocutors Sagredo, Simplicio, and Salviati suspend their learned conversation on forces of fracture and resistance to indulge in yet another digression among many that have become well known as characteristic marks of Galileo's texts. Sagredo, the aristocratic amateur of natural philosophy and mathematics addresses Simplicio, the Aristotelian philosopher, with the following remark:

Simplicio, portrayed in this not very polemical text as an openminded scholar, graciously responds:

When Galileo left the University of Pisa without taking a degree in the spring of 1585, he was a promising young mathematician with an experimental bent, but there was nothing to foretell his later interest in astronomy. He earned his living by giving private lessons in Florence and Siena, and it is probably at this time that he wrote a short Treatise on the Sphere or Cosmography for the use of his pupils.

This elementary textbook of spherical astronomy is based on the thirteenth-century Sphere of John Holywood, better known under his Latinized name of Sacrobosco. It is conventional in its geocentrism and makes no mention of Copernicus. Galileo may have used it when he became a Professor of Mathematics at Pisa (1589-92) and during the first years of his professorship at Padua (1592-1610).

In Pisa, Galileo made the acquaintance of Jacopo Mazzoni, a philosopher who sought to combine the insights of Plato and Aristotle, and with whom he stayed in touch after he had left Tuscany for the Venetian Republic. It was this friend who, in 1597, provided Galileo with his first opportunity of stating his opinion that the heliocentric theory of Copernicus was more probable than the geocentric system of Aristotle and Ptolemy.

AT THE ROOT OF THE GALILEO AFFAIR

In Bertolt Brecht's play, Galileo, an aged cardinal denounces the upstart astronomer from Florence:

Brecht puts in the mouth of the old cardinal what he himself may well have believed the primary motive to be on the church's side of the “Galileo affair” Certainly, this reading of history has been a common one from the time of the Enlightenment onwards. Why were Galileo's Copernican views met with such hostility on the part of his Church? What could have explained the violent opposition of the Roman authorities to the views of someone who was after all recognized by these same authorities as the leading astronomer in the Italy of his day? Why would they have risked such a clash where the stakes were obviously so high?

Galileo made essential contributions to the development of inertial mechanics. His two most basic contributions were to collect the set of problems that held the keys to inertial mechanics and then address them all with an effective, consistent mechanics.

Classical mechanics is still taught by referring new students to the core set of problems that had to be solved by the original investigators like Descartes, Gassendi, Huygens, Wallis, Wren, Hooke, and Newton, all following Galileo's original line of attack. These problems include the analysis of motion on an inclined plane, the motion of a pendulum, the action of a lever, the force of a spring or pull in a rope, the result of collisions between impacting and moving bodies, and so on.

Inertial mechanics was extended to a far wider range of problems, but no writer before Galileo had put so many of the basic problems together in a single, articulate discussion. For that reason alone we may describe Galileo's work as modern in character and properly within the bounds and spirit of classical mechanics, even though the elements of the latter system were not successfully elaborated for almost fifty years after his passing and in spite of the fact that he sometimes proposed mistaken ideas to solve the basic problems.