Word: hadrian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...high theatricality, enhanced by the commanding performance of Alec McCowen, is followed by a dozen others as Rolfe seizes the reins of Vatican government with reforming zeal. With curious prescience, Rolfe's vision anticipates changes that took place in the Catholic Church half a century later. Pope Hadrian shakes the Curia to its foundation by renouncing all claim to temporal sovereignty, and defies tradition by walking through the streets to his coronation. He sells the Vatican treasures and gives the proceeds to the poor. Homelier touches include Hadrian giving an audience to a charwoman who had once befriended...
...wine merchant of prose-witty, luxuriant, Latinate-Rolfe poured out a minor masterpiece of wish fulfillment in his novel Hadrian VII, an account of how a once-rejected candidate for the priesthood was astonishingly elected Pope out of a clear blue Roman sky. Now Hadrian has been skillfully dramatized by Peter Luke, who also relies on A.J.A. Symons' biography of Rolfe, The Quest for Corvo. The result is an effulgent theatrical success in a wan London dramatic season...
...that is not truly the finish, since the play-bizarre, hallucinatory and electrifying-is framed within a play. Hadrian VII ends where it begins, in the bare, shabby lodgings of an eccentric, starving, middle-aged writer named Frederick William Rolfe as the bailiffs arrive to strip him even of the manuscript of his novel. The papal reign has all been a dream, an illusion: the primal stuff of theater...
...getting away), but it became his passion; it had the advantage of belonging to the boyhood of history. Later, for perhaps the very same reason, he threw himself into the study of Gaelic, spent years translating a 12th century Latin bestiary, and became an armchair authority on the Emperor Hadrian...
ARCHITECTURE HOme in a Barrel Vault New museums of late have tended to verge on the grandiose: the columned temple form of the Los Angeles County Museum, the mighty, circular Hirshhorn Museum planned for Washington, D.C., which rivals Hadrian's Tomb in scale. One museum in the process of being formed has decided on a different style. It is Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum, due to open in 1971, and backed by an estimated $75 million left by the late Texas millionaire Kay Kimbell (groceries, oil, insurance). The architect: Philadelphia's Louis I. Kahn...