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The Invention of Love
It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman’s High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student named Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene. On his journey the elder Housman confronts the younger version of himself and his memories of the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson –– the handsome athlete who could not return his feelings.
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
About the author
Tom Stoppard
159 books1,034 followersSir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.
Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.
Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.
He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.
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May 26, 2009
The second Stoppard play that I've read that obsesses on the nature of man's quest for knowledge, examines the motives of the industries (if you want to call them that) of people who are paid to do it, and tries to make the audience answer, really, what the benefit is of knowing obscure bits of knowledge that have little to no impact on how you balance your checkbook or design a house.
I do think that Arcadia stated the issue more simply and beautifully and poignantly, from the brief elegance of, "Its the wanting to know that makes us matter," to Septimus' glorious evocation of the continuous march of humankind, showing how nothing is ever really lost.
But The Invention of Love has its own way of looking at the matter, woven into a story that has its own deep sadness and inevitable comedy, and it has a new obsession that couldn't be stated in a more lovely, Shakespearean-esque way. The Invention of Love centers on classical scholars and poets of the classical style, set in Oxford and a Greek religious afterlife, in the midst of Aesthetes and the practical, disinterseted immortals, amongst endlessly repeating memories and intervals of new discovery. It is absolutely obsessed with language. Characters endlessly correct each other on proper and likely readings and misinterpretations of various Latin and Greek phrases, and insist on getting the words right. "The words, what were the words?" This whole play is like Hamlet repeating "Words, words, words," over and over again, sometimes as a song, sometimes as an intensely insane rant. Stoppard explores the idea, an idea that he dismissed in Arcadia, that the individual way that knowledge is discovered and expressed matters- not merely the idea and application of the idea itself. The personal stamp of the person who brings it to public knowledge matters. Who we acknowledge as the inventor matters. Arcadia made the case that as long as we are passionate in what we want and need to know, it does not matter much the way that we personally find to search for our truths, whether they be trivial, personal, or earth shaking, and that knowledge lost will be found again if humanity needs it, when it needs it. Invention of Love is a bit more indulgent of the idea that individual discoveries, and by extension, individual people at specific times matter. Its a bit more of a nostaglic love letter to scholars than Arcadia was- although it certainly pokes fun at the pompous and ridiculousness of most of them.
That certainly isn't all this play is about, of course. It is also, as the title would suggest, about forms of love, especially those considered not quite "right" at the time, about friendship, the Aesthetic movement within the Victorian morality of the age. I responded to Stoppard's version of A.E. Housman and his unrequited love of an athlete named Moses Jackson. It is gently and not so gently heartbreaking to watch his feelings grow throughout the play and the ultimate culmination that Housman reaches at the end. Oh also, for those fans of Oscar Wilde, he's talked about for a good bit of the piece, but doesn't make a cameo appearance until the end, so you'll have to stick around after intermission to get a glimpse of him.
Well worth it, as always.
I do think that Arcadia stated the issue more simply and beautifully and poignantly, from the brief elegance of, "Its the wanting to know that makes us matter," to Septimus' glorious evocation of the continuous march of humankind, showing how nothing is ever really lost.
But The Invention of Love has its own way of looking at the matter, woven into a story that has its own deep sadness and inevitable comedy, and it has a new obsession that couldn't be stated in a more lovely, Shakespearean-esque way. The Invention of Love centers on classical scholars and poets of the classical style, set in Oxford and a Greek religious afterlife, in the midst of Aesthetes and the practical, disinterseted immortals, amongst endlessly repeating memories and intervals of new discovery. It is absolutely obsessed with language. Characters endlessly correct each other on proper and likely readings and misinterpretations of various Latin and Greek phrases, and insist on getting the words right. "The words, what were the words?" This whole play is like Hamlet repeating "Words, words, words," over and over again, sometimes as a song, sometimes as an intensely insane rant. Stoppard explores the idea, an idea that he dismissed in Arcadia, that the individual way that knowledge is discovered and expressed matters- not merely the idea and application of the idea itself. The personal stamp of the person who brings it to public knowledge matters. Who we acknowledge as the inventor matters. Arcadia made the case that as long as we are passionate in what we want and need to know, it does not matter much the way that we personally find to search for our truths, whether they be trivial, personal, or earth shaking, and that knowledge lost will be found again if humanity needs it, when it needs it. Invention of Love is a bit more indulgent of the idea that individual discoveries, and by extension, individual people at specific times matter. Its a bit more of a nostaglic love letter to scholars than Arcadia was- although it certainly pokes fun at the pompous and ridiculousness of most of them.
That certainly isn't all this play is about, of course. It is also, as the title would suggest, about forms of love, especially those considered not quite "right" at the time, about friendship, the Aesthetic movement within the Victorian morality of the age. I responded to Stoppard's version of A.E. Housman and his unrequited love of an athlete named Moses Jackson. It is gently and not so gently heartbreaking to watch his feelings grow throughout the play and the ultimate culmination that Housman reaches at the end. Oh also, for those fans of Oscar Wilde, he's talked about for a good bit of the piece, but doesn't make a cameo appearance until the end, so you'll have to stick around after intermission to get a glimpse of him.
Well worth it, as always.
June 11, 2008
Every time I read a play by Tom Stoppard, I feel reborn.
September 3, 2011
Unexpectedly moved (it was late) by a recent poem of the week, I've been reading the new Penguin edition of A. E. Housman, and (in turn) its introduction by Nick Laird prompted me to dig out The Invention of Love. I missed Stoppard's play when it premiered at ACT in 2000 – why? I don't remember, but I'm ashamed.
As usual with Stoppard, the drama is a dazzling bricolage of biography and literary quotation. If I hadn't read Laird and Richard Ellmann's matchless biography of Wilde, I would have missed much more than I did. Stoppard's a genius and he can't help showing off. AEH, the ghost of Housman standing on the bank of the Styx, is hardly a subject you'd expect to find moving – but accompanied by the banter of other ghosts boating by (Wilde, Ruskin, Pater, and various comely lads), the dead man is eloquent.
He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways.
Yes, it's all very sad (that was Housman shaking hands with the Oxford chum he was in love with, who shrugged him off, moved to India and married), and Stoppard makes everything of the pathos and pathetic comedy of Housman. He was a queer one, both an acerbic scholar of the classics ("beyond serious dispute, among the greatest of all time"; "a scholar worshipped and hated for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly"*) as well as a sentimental poet of homoerotic necrophilia – elegant elegies to "all those ploughboys and village lads dropping like flies all over Shropshire," as one of Stoppard's characters remarks. The first readers of A Shropshire Lad "might well have been puzzled by its corpse-strewn landscape and wondered what massacre or epidemic had laid so many of Terence's friends low; if they're not in the pub it's because they're already in the churchyard." The book made barely an impression when it was published in 1896, but it seemed to be "in every pocket" of the doomed young men marching off to France in 1914. "As Robert Lowell observed, it was as if Housman had foreseen the Somme." (All this from Alan Hollinghurst's introduction to the very slim ff selection.)
This review is already too long for saying so little about Stoppard - but one more footnote. In 1887 Édouard Dujardin published a "stream of consciousness" novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés. James Joyce credited it with inspiring the "interior monologues" of Ulysses. When it was translated into English in 1938, it was titled We'll to the Woods No More, which resonates with the fading echoes of Edwardian England and inspired all manner of melodies. One night poking around the internet, I discovered how this happened. Housman, of course, translating a French line from Théodore de Banville – and this review will fade out itself with these perfectly plaintive lines:
We'll to the woods no more,
The laurels are all cut,
The bowers are bare of bay
That once the Muses wore;
The year draws in the day
And soon will evening shut:
The laurels all are cut,
We'll to the woods no more.
Oh we'll no more, no more
To the leafy woods away,
To the high wild woods of laurel
And the bowers of bay no more.
As usual with Stoppard, the drama is a dazzling bricolage of biography and literary quotation. If I hadn't read Laird and Richard Ellmann's matchless biography of Wilde, I would have missed much more than I did. Stoppard's a genius and he can't help showing off. AEH, the ghost of Housman standing on the bank of the Styx, is hardly a subject you'd expect to find moving – but accompanied by the banter of other ghosts boating by (Wilde, Ruskin, Pater, and various comely lads), the dead man is eloquent.
He would not stay for me; and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways.
Yes, it's all very sad (that was Housman shaking hands with the Oxford chum he was in love with, who shrugged him off, moved to India and married), and Stoppard makes everything of the pathos and pathetic comedy of Housman. He was a queer one, both an acerbic scholar of the classics ("beyond serious dispute, among the greatest of all time"; "a scholar worshipped and hated for his meticulous standards and his appalling sarcasms on the unscholarly"*) as well as a sentimental poet of homoerotic necrophilia – elegant elegies to "all those ploughboys and village lads dropping like flies all over Shropshire," as one of Stoppard's characters remarks. The first readers of A Shropshire Lad "might well have been puzzled by its corpse-strewn landscape and wondered what massacre or epidemic had laid so many of Terence's friends low; if they're not in the pub it's because they're already in the churchyard." The book made barely an impression when it was published in 1896, but it seemed to be "in every pocket" of the doomed young men marching off to France in 1914. "As Robert Lowell observed, it was as if Housman had foreseen the Somme." (All this from Alan Hollinghurst's introduction to the very slim ff selection.)
This review is already too long for saying so little about Stoppard - but one more footnote. In 1887 Édouard Dujardin published a "stream of consciousness" novel, Les Lauriers sont coupés. James Joyce credited it with inspiring the "interior monologues" of Ulysses. When it was translated into English in 1938, it was titled We'll to the Woods No More, which resonates with the fading echoes of Edwardian England and inspired all manner of melodies. One night poking around the internet, I discovered how this happened. Housman, of course, translating a French line from Théodore de Banville – and this review will fade out itself with these perfectly plaintive lines:
We'll to the woods no more,
The laurels are all cut,
The bowers are bare of bay
That once the Muses wore;
The year draws in the day
And soon will evening shut:
The laurels all are cut,
We'll to the woods no more.
Oh we'll no more, no more
To the leafy woods away,
To the high wild woods of laurel
And the bowers of bay no more.
February 10, 2026
There are a lot of ideas in this play: 19th-century Oxford, industrialization, Aestheticism, Decadence, homosexuality, Ruskin, Pater, Oscar Wilde, science, humanity, philology—and at the center is the scholar and poet, AE Housman, sitting on the shores of the river Styx thinking back on his life while he waits to be carried to Elysian Fields. Lost in nostalgic reveries, he sees his youthful self punting by him and talking cheerily with friends. He thinks back on a career emending textual errors, realizing the course of his own life was perhaps rife with its own multitudinous follies.
And at the end, Wilde shows up. It's somehow surprising to realize that Housman, the arid, acrimonious scholar, overlapped with Wilde at Oxford. As a scholar, Housman dedicated himself solely to textual criticism and the art (or in his view "science") of reconstructing the author's original out of the many corrupt witnesses found in medieval copies. For Housman, every manuscript and every modern edition of Latin poetry was a garbled mishmash made by uneducated scribes and, even worse, scholars who were too educated, nincompoops with a haughty self-regard. Although born in the 19th century, he behaved more like the Renaissance scholars Scaliger and Bentley, viciously lambasting his colleagues with bitter invectives. In that regard, he was something like Wilde—a man out of sorts with the stuffy decorum of British society, albeit with less celebrity.
Stoppard's play is genius, showing two heroic anachronisms side by side: Housman and Wilde. Both writers were enamored with the classical world and both saw in Greece and Rome a liberating alternative to the moral strictures of British society, but whereas Wilde was inspired by classical literature, Housman merely wanted to preserve it. Wilde romanticized a golden era of art and beauty; Housman had little to say about beauty and was instead committed to restoring a fragmentary and corrupted literature word by word. Wilde famously said, "One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar"—but Housman is all details. In Stoppard's play, Housman is obtuse and seems to completely miss the point of studying Latin. Reading Catullus in his Oxford days, he is surprised by the word "basium" instead of the more usual "osculum"—and it is his friend Moses Jackson who points out that Housman has missed the real crux of the poem: this is about illicit kisses. "All knowledge is previous, whether it serves the slightest human use or not," Housman is reputed to have said, and Stoppard's play shows the scholar doggedly obsessed with case-endings, lexicography and manuscript variants, missing the most important value of Latin verse: love.
At the start of the play, Housman quotes a fragment from Sophocles' "Lovers of Achilles": "Love is like ice in the hands of children." The children naturally want to hold onto the ice but, if they do, it will melt, and so they are caught between desire and prudence, knowing that to play with the ice will ultimately destroy it. So it is with lovers, as Sophocles argues. Love makes the lover desire the beloved but the same love also cautions the lover against imprudently acting on it, and that is the defining difference between Wilde and Housman. Wilde was willing to seek out love, unreservedly, recklessly, extravagantly, ruinously. Housman, however, was stolid, repressed, and self-annihilating in his solitary pursuit of textual purity. Throughout Stoppard's play, Housman's younger self is painfully in love with his friend but incapable of saying out loud how he feels. He devotes himself to the study of Propertius' love elegies perhaps only to sublimate his own erotic trials into a vicarious textual fidelity. If he can't hold his beloved in his arms, maybe he can at least have the real Propertius in his hands.
Textual criticism is an apt metaphor for a repressed homosexual. The textual critic's job is to survey the wide range of manuscript variants, all corruptions descending from an authentic original, and then to emend and purify away the imperfections. Housman called it "divination", conferring a sacerdotal and prophetic power on what he otherwise called a science. A good manuscript, like a lover, is considered "faithful"; a bad copy, like queer men often are, is called 'deviant' and 'contaminated'. The ironic tragedy of Housman's life is that in pursuing the classics, in trying to restore the love verses of Catullus and Propertius and Ovid, in divining the pure, he was engaging in a psychically pernicious activity: culling what is aberrant, wrong, corrupt, unfaithful. It is a habit of mind that suits a man uneasy with his own purity and self-worth. He can't bring himself to even admit his homosexuality. What a barbarous word, a Greek and Latin compound, he complains in Stoppard's play—again singularly focused on linguistic purism when faced with the subject of sexual deviance.
This is a supremely cerebral play with many hard-to-get jokes. It is, to me, unfathomable that Tom Stoppard was not a Latin scholar because he achieves here what seems impossible: to turn the minutia of an apparatus criticus into a running comedy. He was, unquestionably, a polymath and a genius.
And at the end, Wilde shows up. It's somehow surprising to realize that Housman, the arid, acrimonious scholar, overlapped with Wilde at Oxford. As a scholar, Housman dedicated himself solely to textual criticism and the art (or in his view "science") of reconstructing the author's original out of the many corrupt witnesses found in medieval copies. For Housman, every manuscript and every modern edition of Latin poetry was a garbled mishmash made by uneducated scribes and, even worse, scholars who were too educated, nincompoops with a haughty self-regard. Although born in the 19th century, he behaved more like the Renaissance scholars Scaliger and Bentley, viciously lambasting his colleagues with bitter invectives. In that regard, he was something like Wilde—a man out of sorts with the stuffy decorum of British society, albeit with less celebrity.
Stoppard's play is genius, showing two heroic anachronisms side by side: Housman and Wilde. Both writers were enamored with the classical world and both saw in Greece and Rome a liberating alternative to the moral strictures of British society, but whereas Wilde was inspired by classical literature, Housman merely wanted to preserve it. Wilde romanticized a golden era of art and beauty; Housman had little to say about beauty and was instead committed to restoring a fragmentary and corrupted literature word by word. Wilde famously said, "One should absorb the color of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar"—but Housman is all details. In Stoppard's play, Housman is obtuse and seems to completely miss the point of studying Latin. Reading Catullus in his Oxford days, he is surprised by the word "basium" instead of the more usual "osculum"—and it is his friend Moses Jackson who points out that Housman has missed the real crux of the poem: this is about illicit kisses. "All knowledge is previous, whether it serves the slightest human use or not," Housman is reputed to have said, and Stoppard's play shows the scholar doggedly obsessed with case-endings, lexicography and manuscript variants, missing the most important value of Latin verse: love.
At the start of the play, Housman quotes a fragment from Sophocles' "Lovers of Achilles": "Love is like ice in the hands of children." The children naturally want to hold onto the ice but, if they do, it will melt, and so they are caught between desire and prudence, knowing that to play with the ice will ultimately destroy it. So it is with lovers, as Sophocles argues. Love makes the lover desire the beloved but the same love also cautions the lover against imprudently acting on it, and that is the defining difference between Wilde and Housman. Wilde was willing to seek out love, unreservedly, recklessly, extravagantly, ruinously. Housman, however, was stolid, repressed, and self-annihilating in his solitary pursuit of textual purity. Throughout Stoppard's play, Housman's younger self is painfully in love with his friend but incapable of saying out loud how he feels. He devotes himself to the study of Propertius' love elegies perhaps only to sublimate his own erotic trials into a vicarious textual fidelity. If he can't hold his beloved in his arms, maybe he can at least have the real Propertius in his hands.
Textual criticism is an apt metaphor for a repressed homosexual. The textual critic's job is to survey the wide range of manuscript variants, all corruptions descending from an authentic original, and then to emend and purify away the imperfections. Housman called it "divination", conferring a sacerdotal and prophetic power on what he otherwise called a science. A good manuscript, like a lover, is considered "faithful"; a bad copy, like queer men often are, is called 'deviant' and 'contaminated'. The ironic tragedy of Housman's life is that in pursuing the classics, in trying to restore the love verses of Catullus and Propertius and Ovid, in divining the pure, he was engaging in a psychically pernicious activity: culling what is aberrant, wrong, corrupt, unfaithful. It is a habit of mind that suits a man uneasy with his own purity and self-worth. He can't bring himself to even admit his homosexuality. What a barbarous word, a Greek and Latin compound, he complains in Stoppard's play—again singularly focused on linguistic purism when faced with the subject of sexual deviance.
This is a supremely cerebral play with many hard-to-get jokes. It is, to me, unfathomable that Tom Stoppard was not a Latin scholar because he achieves here what seems impossible: to turn the minutia of an apparatus criticus into a running comedy. He was, unquestionably, a polymath and a genius.
December 25, 2008
Even better than 'Arcadia,' and that's really saying something.
***
(from a 2004 blog post)
Damn, that is a smashin' play. The circularity of it all got a little tiresome towards the end ("Mr. Stoppard doesn’t borrow other dramatists’ plots. He has no need. He has no plots" -- John Heilpern in the Observer), and was the most annoyingly-Stoppardian thing about it, but I loved the long monologues about literary scholarship and Latin love poetry, real prose structures, and most of AE's lines direct from his own mouth -- or pen, rather. Those are probably just the things that would make it unpalatable to a larger audience, but hell, if they want to watch Baywatch, let them eat cheesecake. The play offers great possibilities mandere for the actors playing AE, Housman, and Wilde (and why is Wilde stuck in there? As kinsman and foil to the poet-scholar, inevitably; but at his appearance if you know he died in 1900 the brain skips in that groove, 1900-1936, 1900-1936, until Stoppard shows his poetic license and registration) but the other characters are mostly ciphers, except for a few moments with Chamberlain. It'd be lovely to see what great elderly character actors could do with monuments such as Jowett and Ruskin, though. (I freely admit my heart warmed toward Housman not just because I learned he was at "their" St. John's College but also that he gutted Jowett like a fish.) Further showing up the rather false flashiness of pairing Wilde and Housman, as Michael M. Thomas observes, "Housman would have been writing Last Poems in Cambridge at almost the exact same time as, 80 miles to the southwest in London, T.S. Eliot would have been putting the finishing touches on The Wasteland....What a pairing! If ever there was a made-for-Stoppard juxtaposition, wouldn't it be these two men, dry in a dry season?"
But in a very real sense that doesn't matter, given such stuff as Housman's two different sayings of "Corruption?" -- "Oh, corruption" and not just the is-love-real-or-is-it-only-invented arguments which give the play its title, but also one of the best moments in theatre ever: "You think there is an answer: the lost autograph copy of life's meaning, which we might recover from the corruptions that have made it nonsense. But if there is no such copy, really and truly there is no answer." And in that you see text and breath alloyed together, as if they weren't really separate at all.
Invention is sort of a lot more unwieldy and awkward than the sleekness of Arcadia, but at the same time, everything happens _offstage_ in Arcadia -- Byron, Thomasina's (spoiler), what happens to Septimus -- and Housman is on the stage so much in Invention it's quite the opposite, he's there _all the time,_ and the emotion just sears your heart. -- I do quibble with some of the ways he _portrayed_ Housman -- he has AE crying out to Mo, "You're half my life!" when in reality what we have is
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my life in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways
in a poem. Which Mo probably never read. And deliberately didn't understand, if he did read it. And I really doubt AE would have blurted out anything like that. I can understand why Stoppard does it, but...well, anyway, it's a quibble.
Anthony Lane's NYorker article on the play is really amazing. "Lost Horizon: the Sad and Savage Wit of AE Housman" (He says in either the intro to Nobody's Perfect or a Tina Brown encomium that her query about the piece was, 'Is Housman hot?')
***
(from a 2004 blog post)
Damn, that is a smashin' play. The circularity of it all got a little tiresome towards the end ("Mr. Stoppard doesn’t borrow other dramatists’ plots. He has no need. He has no plots" -- John Heilpern in the Observer), and was the most annoyingly-Stoppardian thing about it, but I loved the long monologues about literary scholarship and Latin love poetry, real prose structures, and most of AE's lines direct from his own mouth -- or pen, rather. Those are probably just the things that would make it unpalatable to a larger audience, but hell, if they want to watch Baywatch, let them eat cheesecake. The play offers great possibilities mandere for the actors playing AE, Housman, and Wilde (and why is Wilde stuck in there? As kinsman and foil to the poet-scholar, inevitably; but at his appearance if you know he died in 1900 the brain skips in that groove, 1900-1936, 1900-1936, until Stoppard shows his poetic license and registration) but the other characters are mostly ciphers, except for a few moments with Chamberlain. It'd be lovely to see what great elderly character actors could do with monuments such as Jowett and Ruskin, though. (I freely admit my heart warmed toward Housman not just because I learned he was at "their" St. John's College but also that he gutted Jowett like a fish.) Further showing up the rather false flashiness of pairing Wilde and Housman, as Michael M. Thomas observes, "Housman would have been writing Last Poems in Cambridge at almost the exact same time as, 80 miles to the southwest in London, T.S. Eliot would have been putting the finishing touches on The Wasteland....What a pairing! If ever there was a made-for-Stoppard juxtaposition, wouldn't it be these two men, dry in a dry season?"
But in a very real sense that doesn't matter, given such stuff as Housman's two different sayings of "Corruption?" -- "Oh, corruption" and not just the is-love-real-or-is-it-only-invented arguments which give the play its title, but also one of the best moments in theatre ever: "You think there is an answer: the lost autograph copy of life's meaning, which we might recover from the corruptions that have made it nonsense. But if there is no such copy, really and truly there is no answer." And in that you see text and breath alloyed together, as if they weren't really separate at all.
Invention is sort of a lot more unwieldy and awkward than the sleekness of Arcadia, but at the same time, everything happens _offstage_ in Arcadia -- Byron, Thomasina's (spoiler), what happens to Septimus -- and Housman is on the stage so much in Invention it's quite the opposite, he's there _all the time,_ and the emotion just sears your heart. -- I do quibble with some of the ways he _portrayed_ Housman -- he has AE crying out to Mo, "You're half my life!" when in reality what we have is
He would not stay for me, and who can wonder?
He would not stay for me to stand and gaze.
I shook his hand and tore my life in sunder
And went with half my life about my ways
in a poem. Which Mo probably never read. And deliberately didn't understand, if he did read it. And I really doubt AE would have blurted out anything like that. I can understand why Stoppard does it, but...well, anyway, it's a quibble.
Anthony Lane's NYorker article on the play is really amazing. "Lost Horizon: the Sad and Savage Wit of AE Housman" (He says in either the intro to Nobody's Perfect or a Tina Brown encomium that her query about the piece was, 'Is Housman hot?')
December 13, 2014
my senior year high school english teacher recommended this to me, because of The Classics (and indeed the moment a line of vergil about the styx was spoken aloud i knew i was Home), but little did she know that this play is in fact an assemblage of all i've ever loved: classics! aesthetics! homosexuality! pretentiousness! pretentious homosexuality in oxford! delicate meditations/vignettes on youth, death, and scholarship! oh god this play is my happy place. and i should maybe be ashamed that what my taste in literature comes down to is gay english snobbery, but...well, yes, in many ways my taste in literature is gay english snobbery.
Read
February 13, 2022This was not what I expected, but it was very good.
June 14, 2007
Basically, let us summarize my rhapsodizing thus: I want Tom Stoppard to write my life.
HOUSMAN: Scholarship... [is] where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God. It doesn't mean I don't care about the poetry. I do. Diffugere nives goes through me like a spear.... The recovery of ancient texts is the highest task of all - Erasmus, bless him. It is work to be done. Posterity has a brisk way with manuscripts: scholarship is a small redress against the vast unreason of what is taken from us - it's not just the worthless that perish, Jesus doesn't save.
HOUSMAN: Scholarship... [is] where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it's for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn't matter where on what, it's the light itself, against the darkness, it's what's left of God's purpose when you take away God. It doesn't mean I don't care about the poetry. I do. Diffugere nives goes through me like a spear.... The recovery of ancient texts is the highest task of all - Erasmus, bless him. It is work to be done. Posterity has a brisk way with manuscripts: scholarship is a small redress against the vast unreason of what is taken from us - it's not just the worthless that perish, Jesus doesn't save.
March 17, 2024
I fell in love with Stoppard's work after Arcadia, and this play is quite literally right up my alley—language, love, and tragedy.
It would be a dream to see one of his plays live someday.
“At night I hold you fast in my dreams, I run after you across the Fields of Mars, I follow you into the tumbling waters, and you show no pity.”
It would be a dream to see one of his plays live someday.
November 6, 2022
“You want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself… to be shipwrecked together, (to) perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him - to die in his arms, like a Spartan, kissed once on the lips… or just run his errands in the meanwhile. You want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.”
TOM YOU CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS
🎵love cuts the strings by the mountain goats: https://open.spotify.com/track/3pyf7Q...
TOM YOU CANT KEEP GETTING AWAY WITH THIS
🎵love cuts the strings by the mountain goats: https://open.spotify.com/track/3pyf7Q...
November 22, 2024
We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention.
what the fuck actually!!!!!!!!!!!!! really good. really really good. tom stoppard when i fucking get you—
act I had me lost because i’m not a classics scholar. act II had me lost in an altogether different way; swept out by emotion, desperate for—something. resolution? it’s agonizing. what can i do but admire and admire the mind at work that made this—every piece chosen and placed exquisitely. i need to see it onstage sometime
what the fuck actually!!!!!!!!!!!!! really good. really really good. tom stoppard when i fucking get you—
act I had me lost because i’m not a classics scholar. act II had me lost in an altogether different way; swept out by emotion, desperate for—something. resolution? it’s agonizing. what can i do but admire and admire the mind at work that made this—every piece chosen and placed exquisitely. i need to see it onstage sometime
February 4, 2020
“aeh: i would have died for you but I never had the luck!”
there is so much beautiful language in this play. some of the descriptions of love are so well written and contain so much emotion that they made my jaw drop. here’s another favorite quote:
“housman: what do I want?
chamberlain: nothing which you’d call indecent, though I don’t see what’s wrong with it myself. you want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself... to be shipwrecked together, (to) perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him - to die in his arms, like a spartan, kissed once on the lips... or just run his errands in the meanwhile. you want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.”
there is so much beautiful language in this play. some of the descriptions of love are so well written and contain so much emotion that they made my jaw drop. here’s another favorite quote:
“housman: what do I want?
chamberlain: nothing which you’d call indecent, though I don’t see what’s wrong with it myself. you want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself... to be shipwrecked together, (to) perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him - to die in his arms, like a spartan, kissed once on the lips... or just run his errands in the meanwhile. you want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 20, 2024
“It’s where we’re nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake. Useful knowledge is good, too, but it’s for the faint-hearted, an elaboration of the real thing, which is only to shine some light, it doesn’t matter where on what, it’s the light itself, against the darkness, it’s what’s left of God’s purpose when you take away God."
absolutely tragic that the only video recording i can find of this play doesnt include the last quarter or so .. gutting!
absolutely tragic that the only video recording i can find of this play doesnt include the last quarter or so .. gutting!
May 22, 2007
Though true to his usual loquacious brilliance, Stoppard is a bit indulgent in this work. I found myself rolling my eyes after fourteen obscure literary references and nineteen syllable words. All right Tom, we know you're brilliant. Quit showing off. Just write us a thought-provoking story.
January 29, 2022
I loved this. To me, this is a perfect play. Oscar Wilde is an actual character in it, need I say more? Also, I would give anything to be able to travel back in time to watch its 2001 Broadway production starring Robert Sean Leonard and David Harbour.
February 20, 2022
you know when phoebe bridgers sings "when i think too much about it, i can't breathe" ?
that's how i feel about tom stoppard's plays
that's how i feel about tom stoppard's plays
March 31, 2025
many questions, few answers. so beautiful and painful watching slices of housman's life flicker by... waiting on wilde like godot to deliver that last sucker punch. phew. love will not be deflected from its mischief by being called comradeship or anything else. you're half my life. i would have died for you but i never had the luck! crazymaking.
March 10, 2022
я я я я я я я di immortales какой потрясающий текст еще прекраснее чем я ожидала и могла ожидать теперь хочется заполучить его на бумаге и впервые в жизни подчеркнуть подписать отметить на полях вообще все. ну просто до одури хорошо. филологически = влюбленно все как завещал катулл.
January 10, 2023
Unfortunately most of this play went over my head as I do not have a background in classics. The first act was almost impossible for me to understand.
April 17, 2024
I found this play very compelling. I’m not sure, strictly speaking, that I’d call it “good.”
It’s a matter of who the audience is, really, and by the play’s end I still didn’t feel I could pinpoint just who this was written for. The protagonist is A.E. Housman, and I think what a given reader knows about him coming into this play will determine how much they’ll be able to get out of it.
I first read this book as part of an undergraduate Latin course on the Roman elegists (“love poets,” to greatly simplify who the Roman elegists were and what they wrote), which I think was essential, because the first act of the play relies very, very heavily both upon knowing Latin generally and upon knowing specifically that A.E. Housman was a renowned Latin scholar in his day. Without that context, I have to imagine large portions of this play’s first act are largely inscrutable to most readers, because I know Latin and who Housman was, and I still found parts of Act I going over my head. That’s the main reason I couldn’t rate this play higher, and frankly, I thought pretty hard about citing it as a reason to rate it lower.
The problem is that Act II is really good. It’s a heartbreaking story about a gay man (i.e. Housman) confessing his love for someone who doesn’t feel the same way, and at a time in history when homosexuality was very much an unwelcome phenomenon in English society. Discussions of its morality and its prevalence in the England of Housman’s day underpin the plots of both acts, but play a much larger role in Act II, when Housman finds himself torn away from the man he loved because he was made to confess his feelings despite not wanting to. Reflecting on the matter, Housman at one point says “confession is an act of violence against the unoffending” (pg. 89), and I found that line heartbreaking.
This aspect of the play is enhanced by Stoppard’s choice to include verbatim some of Housman’s poetry in the character’s lines in Act II. Specifically, he includes “He would not stay for me, and who can wonder,” a beautiful poem I’m very glad to have read. I wish there’d been more of this earlier on, because in looking up the poem to confirm that it was, in fact, Housman’s work and not Stoppard’s, I learned that Housman is not just a renowned classicist, but a successful English poet, to boot. That feels like a piece of the “who’s this play’s audience?” puzzle – I still can’t imagine this play landing with someone who knows no Latin, but I suspect readers who are already fans of Housman’s poetry will find this a fascinating take on who A.E. Housman might have been in his private life.
Certainly that’s where I landed, because of my background in academia, and in classics specifically. The play features a fair bit of biting commentary on how scholars conduct themselves as professionals. At one point, Housman is giving a lecture, and a student begins to cry, and his response is rather cold – moreover he uses the situation as a springboard to returning to the topic of his lecture (pg. 48-49). At another point, Housman’s younger self asks his older self why someone can’t be both a poet and a scholar, and the older man replies “poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship” (pg. 36).
Perhaps the part that hit home the hardest was a passage on pg. 71, when the younger Housman says first “if I’m disrespectful [in the things I say about other scholars in my own scholarly work], it’s because it’s important, and not a game anyone can play,” and shortly thereafter describes scholarly endeavors as “useless knowledge for its own sake.” I don’t think that’s entirely a fair way to think about academic pursuits, but there have certainly been moments in my life, as I was pursuing academic degrees of my own, where I couldn’t stop thinking about all the other things I could’ve been doing instead, as I pored over Latin commentaries in which one scholar claimed another scholar had no idea what they were talking about. I think this element of the play, critiquing academic culture and attitudes, transcends the specifics of its protagonist and setting, and is a major highlight of the work.
While the play might challenge my degrees’ “usefulness,” I should note that two of my favorite moments depend entirely upon my time steeped in the classics. First, perhaps the play’s funniest bit of dialogue is on pg. 91, when Housman learns that England’s gay community has decided to call themselves “homosexuals,” to which he indignantly responds, “Homosexuals? Who is responsible for this barbarity? …It’s half Greek and half Latin!” Then there’s a bit of insight which comes on pg. 13, when Housman says “basium [as it appears in Catullus 5] is a point of interest. A kiss was always osculum before Catullus.” Again, one might debate how “useful” knowing such a detail is, but I first read The Invention of Love in 2016, and I’ve never forgotten that line. To be able to point to one author, and say his work had that large an impact on his language, is an incredible thing, the very sort of thing that convinces me that even if it’s rarely immediately applicable to most moments in our day-to-day lives, scholarship – including classical scholarship – is useful, is meaningful, is worth the time.
Having written all this, perhaps I would call this play “good” after all. Perhaps “not particularly accessible” is more accurate. As I said, and as I’ve tried to show, this play relies so very much on knowing additional outside material in order to land with its audience. Most of it doesn’t really work without a lot of additional context. Accordingly, I don’t think I’d necessarily recommend it unless you’ve already got the working knowledge required. I am glad to have reread The Invention of Love, however, because the good parts are excellent, and for me, it was worth stumbling through the parts I didn’t fully appreciate to read what I did.
It’s a matter of who the audience is, really, and by the play’s end I still didn’t feel I could pinpoint just who this was written for. The protagonist is A.E. Housman, and I think what a given reader knows about him coming into this play will determine how much they’ll be able to get out of it.
I first read this book as part of an undergraduate Latin course on the Roman elegists (“love poets,” to greatly simplify who the Roman elegists were and what they wrote), which I think was essential, because the first act of the play relies very, very heavily both upon knowing Latin generally and upon knowing specifically that A.E. Housman was a renowned Latin scholar in his day. Without that context, I have to imagine large portions of this play’s first act are largely inscrutable to most readers, because I know Latin and who Housman was, and I still found parts of Act I going over my head. That’s the main reason I couldn’t rate this play higher, and frankly, I thought pretty hard about citing it as a reason to rate it lower.
The problem is that Act II is really good. It’s a heartbreaking story about a gay man (i.e. Housman) confessing his love for someone who doesn’t feel the same way, and at a time in history when homosexuality was very much an unwelcome phenomenon in English society. Discussions of its morality and its prevalence in the England of Housman’s day underpin the plots of both acts, but play a much larger role in Act II, when Housman finds himself torn away from the man he loved because he was made to confess his feelings despite not wanting to. Reflecting on the matter, Housman at one point says “confession is an act of violence against the unoffending” (pg. 89), and I found that line heartbreaking.
This aspect of the play is enhanced by Stoppard’s choice to include verbatim some of Housman’s poetry in the character’s lines in Act II. Specifically, he includes “He would not stay for me, and who can wonder,” a beautiful poem I’m very glad to have read. I wish there’d been more of this earlier on, because in looking up the poem to confirm that it was, in fact, Housman’s work and not Stoppard’s, I learned that Housman is not just a renowned classicist, but a successful English poet, to boot. That feels like a piece of the “who’s this play’s audience?” puzzle – I still can’t imagine this play landing with someone who knows no Latin, but I suspect readers who are already fans of Housman’s poetry will find this a fascinating take on who A.E. Housman might have been in his private life.
Certainly that’s where I landed, because of my background in academia, and in classics specifically. The play features a fair bit of biting commentary on how scholars conduct themselves as professionals. At one point, Housman is giving a lecture, and a student begins to cry, and his response is rather cold – moreover he uses the situation as a springboard to returning to the topic of his lecture (pg. 48-49). At another point, Housman’s younger self asks his older self why someone can’t be both a poet and a scholar, and the older man replies “poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship” (pg. 36).
Perhaps the part that hit home the hardest was a passage on pg. 71, when the younger Housman says first “if I’m disrespectful [in the things I say about other scholars in my own scholarly work], it’s because it’s important, and not a game anyone can play,” and shortly thereafter describes scholarly endeavors as “useless knowledge for its own sake.” I don’t think that’s entirely a fair way to think about academic pursuits, but there have certainly been moments in my life, as I was pursuing academic degrees of my own, where I couldn’t stop thinking about all the other things I could’ve been doing instead, as I pored over Latin commentaries in which one scholar claimed another scholar had no idea what they were talking about. I think this element of the play, critiquing academic culture and attitudes, transcends the specifics of its protagonist and setting, and is a major highlight of the work.
While the play might challenge my degrees’ “usefulness,” I should note that two of my favorite moments depend entirely upon my time steeped in the classics. First, perhaps the play’s funniest bit of dialogue is on pg. 91, when Housman learns that England’s gay community has decided to call themselves “homosexuals,” to which he indignantly responds, “Homosexuals? Who is responsible for this barbarity? …It’s half Greek and half Latin!” Then there’s a bit of insight which comes on pg. 13, when Housman says “basium [as it appears in Catullus 5] is a point of interest. A kiss was always osculum before Catullus.” Again, one might debate how “useful” knowing such a detail is, but I first read The Invention of Love in 2016, and I’ve never forgotten that line. To be able to point to one author, and say his work had that large an impact on his language, is an incredible thing, the very sort of thing that convinces me that even if it’s rarely immediately applicable to most moments in our day-to-day lives, scholarship – including classical scholarship – is useful, is meaningful, is worth the time.
Having written all this, perhaps I would call this play “good” after all. Perhaps “not particularly accessible” is more accurate. As I said, and as I’ve tried to show, this play relies so very much on knowing additional outside material in order to land with its audience. Most of it doesn’t really work without a lot of additional context. Accordingly, I don’t think I’d necessarily recommend it unless you’ve already got the working knowledge required. I am glad to have reread The Invention of Love, however, because the good parts are excellent, and for me, it was worth stumbling through the parts I didn’t fully appreciate to read what I did.
August 29, 2019
This play is about the life, yearnings, studies and poetry of A. E. Housman. It is such an intricate play, interweaving themes and characters across a lifetime! At points, young Housman converses with and questions 77 year-old Housman. It also features imaginary conversations between the newly dead Housman and Oscar Wilde, and a bird's-eye view of the passage of Britain's Amendment Act of 1885 which criminalized intimate relations between men. It is a play of intense beauty with many quotations of and allusions to Horace, Catullus and other classical poets. Near the end, Housman's character recites The Colour of His Hair.
January 18, 2017
A mature entry by Stoppard that casually shuttles back and forth in time, going all the way back to classical antiquity to bring Charon on stage to ferry a few of the departed into Hades. The scholar-turned-pining-patent-office-poet Housman has plenty to time to review his life, even meeting with a younger version of himself near Oxford's Hades. Much of the politics get churned up in the Stygian waters, glimpses of a different world at the end of the nineteenth century.
September 1, 2019
The Invention of Love basically is a play about the life and work of A.E. Housman, the textual critic and poet, with particular, though not exclusive, emphasis on his unrequited love for his straight friend Moses Jackson. It takes the form of a dream the night before Housman's death, although this isn't immediately obvious (the beginning of the play would lead one to believe that it is set in an afterworld following his death, and it is rather confusing until the reader/spectator figures that out), in which he meets his earlier self as well as seeing various colleagues and friends from different periods of his life. In addition to the emotional aspect of the plot with Jackson and discussions about homosexuality by various figures in the play (Oscar Wilde is mentioned many times and makes an appearance in the last scene), there is also much discussion of the nature and importance of textual criticism as opposed to other forms of classical study, which somewhat dovetails with the epistemological concerns of his earlier plays such as Arcadia. (Ruskin, Pater and Jowett are characters.) As with many of his plays, there is some fun at the expense of pompous academics, and more serious satire of journalists. Although I found the play interesting (perhaps because I studied Greek and Latin in college) it did seem more confusing even than the usual Stoppard play.
July 22, 2010
Here is where I say that if you saw me reviewing like a maniac on my Anne Carson kick recently (If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho and Autobiography of Red), you have probably noticed by now that I have a thing for my memories of high school Latin, and for classicism in general. You will if you are some creepy expert on me (or actually know me in real life) also know that I'm a total sucker for Arcadia: A Play, which is honestly more hilarious and well-crafted and heartbreaking than any other play I can think of written in my lifetime off the top of my head.
So what I'm saying is, how did I not find THIS until now? (Read someone else's review for the summary. I'm in rapture mode here.)
I will note, for your information and my own amazed serendipity, that I happened to be retranslating last week precisely the Horace poem this whole play hinges on (classical scholar Housman's favorite, which is probably why my high school Latin teacher's favorite, which is probably why MY favorite), which so apropos of this exact time of year runs:
Horace Ode IV.7
TRANSLATION by me.
(the only word I leave untranslated is pietas and its adjective pius, which is sort of the word they would have used for if you crossed mythic cherry-tree George Washngton with Gandhi with Patrick Henry--pious, selfless, virtuous, and utterly abjectly devoted to everything a good Roman should do, even at the cost of his own life. Its usage here is rather shocking.)
The snows have passed away, and now the grass returns to the fields,
and the leaves upon the trees.
The earth is changing faces, and the waning rivers
overflow their banks.
A Grace, with (all) her Nymphs and sisters twinned,
Dares to lead a chorus in the nude.
"Do not hope for immortality," warns the year, and the hour
which snatches away the kindly day.
(This) warm breeze softens the frost, (but) summer soon will trample spring,
and then itself begin to die, just as, when
fruitful autumn has poured out its bounty, without delay
the stifling winter hastens back.
For speedy moons restore in time their losses in the sky:
but when we sink below
to where pius Aeneas and wealthy Tullus and Ancus wait,
we are but dust and shadows.
Who knows if any gods above will tack tomorrow
to the running total of our days?
All that will outwit posterity's greedy hand
Is what you deed your own delightful self.
And when you sink below, to where Minos
sits his solemn judgment,
Torquatus, (friend!): not family ties nor eloquence
nor even pietas will bring you back.
For Diana cannot free her chaste Hippolytus
from the shades beneath,
nor Theseus ever from dear Perithous
rip the chains of Lethe.
-----------
Ahem.
It's really those last two lines, far superior in the Latin, which haunt this play. In the tattered mythology that remains to us, Theseus and Perithous were kings, dearest of friends, close in that particular ancient Greek male way that blurs the homosocial and the erotic. In a twist on the Orpheus tale, the literature holds that they BOTH go down to the underworld on a quest to drag off Persephone as Pirithous' wife (They'd already stolen an underage Helen, who creepily enough was going to be locked away till she was of age--obviously she doesn't stay kidnapped by them, because fate has made an appointment for her in Troy), and are trapped by Hades. It isn't until (in one of those comic-book-like crossovers that pop up in ancient myth) Herakles rolls through on one of his labors, sees a fellow hero in a jam, and drags Theseus out to the light. But Perithous is out of luck, because he has offended the gods by wanting a goddess as his wife--when Herakles tries to tear him from the spot he is chained, the whole Earth shakes and he is forced to give up.
It's about death, hilariously so (as Housman being ferried by Charon over the river Lethe crashes into Three Men in a Boat including Jerome K. Jerome), but more than that it is of course about love (especially frustrated, hidden, unrequited, forbidden love), and what it cannot conquer (time, prejudice, the closet, and our own naivete). Amid a swirl of British Public School buggery jokes, nods to the Aesthetics, Wilde swallowing up the horizon, and endless obsessive little comic battles over the translation of the 10 or so poems I know anything about in Latin -- not to mention, as with the Carson, the terrible sense of loss of so many beautiful works -- well, this play is among other things about how no beauty you ever perceive in your entire life will evade death, no love no matter how strong will slow it down, and how all the dreams of being transmuted into heroism you ever hold will shatter against the sturdy certainties of life--including those that say "the love of your life may not love you back, or be ABLE to love you back." But it tells you so, in the soaring tradition that Arcadia seems to have started, by making one laugh to tears and then revealing profound beauty and poignancy, which is how art makes all of this bearable and even noble, even as at other times it has been complicit in fostering all the illusions life tends to shatter. And it will accomplish this by first making you laugh and then by making you wonder and then by making your heart stop cold in your throat, where only then you realize it had been beating for the past half hour. And then offering perhaps its greatest solace in the giddy Wildean perversity where it began.
And I really should be asleep but I wanted to say that some things are worth going giddy over, and I will probably see this in the morning and tear it to pieces. (Yes, I edited this in the morning. Amazing how coherent I could be while literally passing out in bed on melatonin, but worth pulling out other themes than merely the mortal ones.)
So what I'm saying is, how did I not find THIS until now? (Read someone else's review for the summary. I'm in rapture mode here.)
I will note, for your information and my own amazed serendipity, that I happened to be retranslating last week precisely the Horace poem this whole play hinges on (classical scholar Housman's favorite, which is probably why my high school Latin teacher's favorite, which is probably why MY favorite), which so apropos of this exact time of year runs:
Horace Ode IV.7
TRANSLATION by me.
(the only word I leave untranslated is pietas and its adjective pius, which is sort of the word they would have used for if you crossed mythic cherry-tree George Washngton with Gandhi with Patrick Henry--pious, selfless, virtuous, and utterly abjectly devoted to everything a good Roman should do, even at the cost of his own life. Its usage here is rather shocking.)
The snows have passed away, and now the grass returns to the fields,
and the leaves upon the trees.
The earth is changing faces, and the waning rivers
overflow their banks.
A Grace, with (all) her Nymphs and sisters twinned,
Dares to lead a chorus in the nude.
"Do not hope for immortality," warns the year, and the hour
which snatches away the kindly day.
(This) warm breeze softens the frost, (but) summer soon will trample spring,
and then itself begin to die, just as, when
fruitful autumn has poured out its bounty, without delay
the stifling winter hastens back.
For speedy moons restore in time their losses in the sky:
but when we sink below
to where pius Aeneas and wealthy Tullus and Ancus wait,
we are but dust and shadows.
Who knows if any gods above will tack tomorrow
to the running total of our days?
All that will outwit posterity's greedy hand
Is what you deed your own delightful self.
And when you sink below, to where Minos
sits his solemn judgment,
Torquatus, (friend!): not family ties nor eloquence
nor even pietas will bring you back.
For Diana cannot free her chaste Hippolytus
from the shades beneath,
nor Theseus ever from dear Perithous
rip the chains of Lethe.
-----------
Ahem.
It's really those last two lines, far superior in the Latin, which haunt this play. In the tattered mythology that remains to us, Theseus and Perithous were kings, dearest of friends, close in that particular ancient Greek male way that blurs the homosocial and the erotic. In a twist on the Orpheus tale, the literature holds that they BOTH go down to the underworld on a quest to drag off Persephone as Pirithous' wife (They'd already stolen an underage Helen, who creepily enough was going to be locked away till she was of age--obviously she doesn't stay kidnapped by them, because fate has made an appointment for her in Troy), and are trapped by Hades. It isn't until (in one of those comic-book-like crossovers that pop up in ancient myth) Herakles rolls through on one of his labors, sees a fellow hero in a jam, and drags Theseus out to the light. But Perithous is out of luck, because he has offended the gods by wanting a goddess as his wife--when Herakles tries to tear him from the spot he is chained, the whole Earth shakes and he is forced to give up.
It's about death, hilariously so (as Housman being ferried by Charon over the river Lethe crashes into Three Men in a Boat including Jerome K. Jerome), but more than that it is of course about love (especially frustrated, hidden, unrequited, forbidden love), and what it cannot conquer (time, prejudice, the closet, and our own naivete). Amid a swirl of British Public School buggery jokes, nods to the Aesthetics, Wilde swallowing up the horizon, and endless obsessive little comic battles over the translation of the 10 or so poems I know anything about in Latin -- not to mention, as with the Carson, the terrible sense of loss of so many beautiful works -- well, this play is among other things about how no beauty you ever perceive in your entire life will evade death, no love no matter how strong will slow it down, and how all the dreams of being transmuted into heroism you ever hold will shatter against the sturdy certainties of life--including those that say "the love of your life may not love you back, or be ABLE to love you back." But it tells you so, in the soaring tradition that Arcadia seems to have started, by making one laugh to tears and then revealing profound beauty and poignancy, which is how art makes all of this bearable and even noble, even as at other times it has been complicit in fostering all the illusions life tends to shatter. And it will accomplish this by first making you laugh and then by making you wonder and then by making your heart stop cold in your throat, where only then you realize it had been beating for the past half hour. And then offering perhaps its greatest solace in the giddy Wildean perversity where it began.
And I really should be asleep but I wanted to say that some things are worth going giddy over, and I will probably see this in the morning and tear it to pieces. (Yes, I edited this in the morning. Amazing how coherent I could be while literally passing out in bed on melatonin, but worth pulling out other themes than merely the mortal ones.)
September 11, 2021
hard work, sometimes, work i wasn't particularly willing to do tonight, so am reaching the end of this on half-remembered pieces of context and a few cursory google searches -- maybe to be returned to ? if i end up reading something that lights it up in my brain again, sets everything turning ?
but if not, still worth reading if only fr a few luminously lovely moments, like: “you want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself … to be shipwrecked together, (to) perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him – to die in his arms, like a spartan, kissed once on the lips … or just run his errands in the meanwhile. you want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.” exquisite !
but if not, still worth reading if only fr a few luminously lovely moments, like: “you want to be brothers-in-arms, to have him to yourself … to be shipwrecked together, (to) perform valiant deeds to earn his admiration, to save him from certain death, to die for him – to die in his arms, like a spartan, kissed once on the lips … or just run his errands in the meanwhile. you want him to know what cannot be spoken, and to make the perfect reply, in the same language.” exquisite !
September 4, 2022
I was left unimpressed, but reading plays often does that to me. It is a whole different experience compared to watching a live performance on stage. I suppose there are some noteworthy characters such as Charon, but the overall progression of the narrative came off to me as dull and stagnant. Still, if one were intrigued by Greek and Roman history and philosophy, the quotations and references made in this play by all the characters would definitely pique one's interest.
January 10, 2023
"Kate: Oh - listen! - The larks think it's daybreak.
AEH: Or the end of the world."
AE Housman is credited with more titles of books and poems than anyone except Shakespeare in the English language; this is his story. He was different and similar to Oscar Wilde, who is a character in the play.
To live with love, love with love, despite love, without love, hoping for love, like the poets of yore, and before. To make their muses immortal while making themselves hollow with yearning. A love that dare not speak it's name, even if everyone allowed it. Today, yesterday, and much before Alexander.
AEH: Or the end of the world."
AE Housman is credited with more titles of books and poems than anyone except Shakespeare in the English language; this is his story. He was different and similar to Oscar Wilde, who is a character in the play.
To live with love, love with love, despite love, without love, hoping for love, like the poets of yore, and before. To make their muses immortal while making themselves hollow with yearning. A love that dare not speak it's name, even if everyone allowed it. Today, yesterday, and much before Alexander.
May 20, 2019
Full of feeling, far sophomoric and delicately subtle. Surely much of the richness is owed to the characters' actual written contributions in history, which Stoppard weaves together into a powerful piece
August 8, 2024
I get why this play was hard to read, given the context of the story and the characters, but there were just too many references to ancient Greek/Roman poets for me to give this 5 stars, mostly because those references were incomprehensible to me.
However, I think I was still able to get the gist of what was going on. The play's structure is very, very interesting, perhaps one of the cooler plays I've read (formally speaking). It's always a bit chaotic in a cool way. I also was quite emotional by the end. Something about seeing a life in this panoramic way is just so moving. Stoppard is a great writer, too.
Definitely something to revisit, as there are so many parallels between different elements.
However, I think I was still able to get the gist of what was going on. The play's structure is very, very interesting, perhaps one of the cooler plays I've read (formally speaking). It's always a bit chaotic in a cool way. I also was quite emotional by the end. Something about seeing a life in this panoramic way is just so moving. Stoppard is a great writer, too.
Definitely something to revisit, as there are so many parallels between different elements.
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September 12, 2024lost dog loves young man — dog young lost man loves, loves lost young man dog, you can't beat Latin: shuffle the words to suit, the endings tell you which loves what, who's young, who lost, if you can't read Latin go home, you've missed it! You kissed the dog.
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