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

This was a delight. It's not really about Housman's relationship with Moses Jackson. In some ways, the relationship is kind of conspicuously absent. Maybe that wouldn't be the case if one saw it enacted; there's just really very little on the page about their interactions. Jackson's brother Adalbert, who was also a friend and companion (and possibly lover) of Housman is also omitted, presumably because it complicates the narrative of AEH having this (somewhat odd, honestly) unrequited passion for Moses Jackson and then just...nothing else for the rest of his life, which is honestly pretty tragic. But also...the play is really really not about that. It's about how Roman poets invented love poetry (and thus possibly the modern ideal of love). And how odd it is that we think of this people who are essentially alien to us in language, society, social organization, etc., but somehow their idea of beauty and love is the same as ours?

Anyway, this is quite funny. Would love to see it in person someday.

I think I need to become more literate and reread this!

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.

Just when you think Tom Stoppard can't get any more dense, along comes this play, which is almost impossibly intellectual. I got ahold of it after awhile, then lost it, then got it back, and was highly impressed with what I understood. I imagine I'll read this play a few more times in my life, my appreciation growing every time I re-read.

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.

You could open this play to a random page, pick a random line, and it will be a quote so beautiful and poignant I'd gladly get it tattooed on my forehead.

One of the better “heart” plays of TS, in my opinion.

It is difficult to read the first act with all the references to english literature, literary history, Latin, philology, Greek etc. If you are not familiar with the concepts. But for a philology enthusiast it is an irreplaceable treat.

New favorite play dropped. I have never immediately loved a text so much as I did this. Oh my god Tom Stoppard

if you like posh men joshing around this is for you

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.