Word: hadrian
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...characters in his fantasy pageant fit into stereotypes of melodrama. Tocqueville was not the last egotist to structure a world view on the assumption that all other human beings are coarse and mediocre. A dramatic rendering of Tocqueville's Recollections would have just as many pitfalls as Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh. Rolfe the "religious fanatic" leaves everyone else in the backwash of his own verbiage and self-esteem-ergo, they are mediocrities first, last and always. Curiously enough, Luke in his dramatic handling takes the fantasy at face value and glorifies the "mediocrities" without tracing their source in Rolfe...
PETER LUKE'S Hadrian VII is a mediocre play with one outstanding central character. Structured like The Wizard of Oz, with a plot line that could have been borrowed from Putney Swope, this comic fantasy has more possibilites as soliloquy than as drama. Frederick William Rolfe, English recluse and neurotic who imagines himself Pope, has dreams more concrete than Dorothy's and ambitions no less earthshaking than Swope's. In treating the complex syndromes of Rolfe, playwright Luke has sidestepped the Putney-Swope assumption that what is sick must be funny: the Oz alternative (what is sick should be taken...
...real life (his creditors, his landlady, his crude Irish friend, the tottery old scrubwoman Agnes) become suddenly transformed by his fantastic vainglory. There must have been some malice in Dorothy's transformation of her favorite farmhands into a scarecrow, a tinman and a lion. Similarly, Rolfe as Pope Hadrian VII can launch heroic reforms in the Church, patronize innocent Agnes with her pickled onions and her rooming house, and (last but not least) become a glorious martyr. Rolfe is assassinated by Jeremiah Sant, the fiery Ulsterman who aids Mrs. Crowe the landlady in blackmail schemes. His dream rounds...
...great seriousness or detail in the depiction of Rolfe's neuroses, but simply a more clear-cut emphasis on them. Rolfe no doubt took himself seriously. But the answer is not to join him in self-glorification any more then to laugh his "sickness" away (the fairy-tale ploy). Hadrian VII could have used a bit more malevolence without slipping into the Swopian mire...
...center of the temple on a terrace overlooking the Aegean Sea, where it safeguarded passing ships and sailors. The most renowned sculpture in all antiquity, it was judged by Pliny as "equally admirable from every angle," and copies of it were prized by Ptolemy IV of Egypt and Hadrian of Rome. Professor Love thinks that the original may still be at Cnidus, buried in the ruins. She plans to resume digging next June...