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.

A witty, erudite look at the life and love of Housman.
The BBC have an archive recording of the radio broadcast featuring most of the original cast, but I'm not holding my breath. Now acquired - excellent radio drama. Ben Whitrow as Ruskin !

It's far too demanding intellectually to get any kind of major revival, alas.

How wrong can you be ? Hampstead Theatre reviving it with Simon Russell Beale this winter - 2924/2025. I have my tickets ...

Dnf

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.

This play is typically Stoppardian, which isn't to say that all of Stoppard's plays contain these traits—meta-theatre, parallel universes, notions of entropy that would make any person with a semblance of what entropy actually is lose his or her shit, a not so surreptitious attempt at writing literary canon fan-fic, etc., etc., etc.—no, not every play contains these traits, but they're in his plays and this one brings them together enjoyably. It's not as good as [i]Arcadia[/i] but it's fine. Its portrayal of Housman is a bit too bleak; one hardly finds the poetic Housman in the play. Perhaps that's good, though, because the dryness of Housman's poetic persona is counter-balanced by Stoppard's excellent handling of Housman-the-critic, who sweats over the thought of whether an 'r' in a manuscript of Catullus was actually a 't'. The passion of Housman comes out in these moments. But it doesn't come out nearly enough (no pun intended). For being a play on the invention of love, Stoppard's handling of Housman as a maudlin love poet is tepid; and his portrayal of Wilde is akin to doing shots of amaro.

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.

This play broke my heart. Its a bit confusing with all of its layers and illusions to the classic, however, it is very clear that the invention of love is also the invention of unrequited love.

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 !

I imagine that one of the reasons that this is not among the more often performed of Stoppard's plays is the fact that it contains so much Latin and Greek, and is peripherally about so many long-dead scholars known to few today. (Although, it also gives a few nods to Pater, Ruskin and Jerome K. Jerome, and a good deal more than a nod to Wilde.) And I don't think that it comes up to the very high standard of Arcadia, or even Travesties, although it has many of the same kinds of wonderful and delightful flights of verbal virtuosity that make many of us love Stoppard.

The tone is (appropriately for a play that mentions Catullus and Propertius so often) elegiac, and that's appropriate also for the life it deals with, repressed and restrained as it was by Housman's time and society and character. (Wilde gives Housman's ghost a parting scolding for the sadness of his life as he's being ferried over by Charon, but not everyone, after all, can be as bold as Oscar.)

As an old friend once said, "That shit is La Bamba sad."

oscar wilde being a character in this play? say less

well written, but mostly appealing for its relatively niche subject matter.