Hanging my head in shame

Am I getting lazy in my old age, or was I always careless? I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between. The question arises because I have just discovered a mistake I have made. Not a serious mistake. Nothing to lose sleep over. No money lost. No crime committed. Nonetheless, I have embarrassed myself and hereby hang my head in shame.

My error? To assume that The Play of Hadrian VII by Peter Luke was merely a dramatisation of the novel Hadrian VII by Fr. Rolfe. Rolfe, the Baron Corvo - as regular readers of this blog know - is the subject of my upcoming play Now We Are Pope, in which the writer is depicted living in Venice, enjoying the company of young gondoliers and living his fantasy as an English Pope.

I have been sending out various leaflets and emails and tweets and FB postings and so on, promoting the play and claiming that it was the first to portray Rolfe (pronounced, by the way, "Roaf") on the stage. Back comes a letter from Cecil Woolf, publisher and Corvinite extraordinaire, informing me in the politest of tones that actually, Mr Luke's play got there almost half a century before me. Aagh! I grimaced and rushed - well, we were meeting that night anyway - round to the house of Christopher Annus, who is to portray Rolfe on the stage, and from him I borrowed a copy of the play.

And there the truth stands revealed. In Luke's full-cast two-act drama, Frederick Rolfe is onstage more or less throughout, first as his real self and then as Hadrian. I could blame C Annus for my mistake - after all, it was he who suggested I write my play and he is more of a Corvo fan than I am. And he had read The Play of . . . years ago, although he had since forgotten that Rolfe appears in it. But of course it isn't Chris's fault. I was the one writing the new play and therefore I was responsible for the research; if my research was incomplete, I have only myself to blame. Which is where we came in - I with my head bowed, wondering if I have always been careless or whether this is something new.

It's not, I tell myself, a disaster. Although the subject matter is the same, my play is different from Luke's. It's shorter and with only one cast member. It takes place in Venice rather than London and Rome. It includes Rolfe's sex life - or lack of it; you'll have to come to the theatre to see how I treat that interesting question - which the earlier play does not. Besides, why shouldn't I tackle the same topic? The more people who write about Rolfe, the more others will become interested in this flawed, fascinating figure whose words and personality still have the power to amuse, annoy and attract admirers and antagonists.