ABSTRACT
Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Germany, in 1898. He began working in the theatre in the 1920s, eventually in Berlin, and had success most notably with The Threepenny Opera, an adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, in 1928 (the extensive contributions to this work by Elizabeth Hauptmann went unacknowledged). In this period he adapted Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Hamlet. He also became deeply interested in Marxism. In 1933, after the night of the Reichstag fire, Brecht fled Nazi Germany. He eventually went to Sweden and Finland before arriving in the United States in 1941. Between 1933 and 1941 Brecht wrote, among other works, Roundheads and Peakheads (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure), The Good Person of Szechwan, Mother Courage and Her Children, and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941) (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III). Margarete Steffin made uncredited contributions to a number of these works. In the United States, Brecht worked on The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Life of Galileo, and an adaptation of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, and tried his hand in Hollywood at screen writing. In 1947, as the cold war took shape, Brecht was questioned by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (‘unamerican’ reminding him disgustedly of the Nazis’ undeutsch – ungerman), and he returned to Europe, first to Switzerland and then to East Germany. In Berlin he helped found the Berliner Ensemble, the renowned theatre company dedicated in large part to the production of Brecht’s plays. During this time he also worked on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Brecht died in 1956, one of the most important figures in twentieth-century theatre.
