Every time I read a play by Tom Stoppard, I feel reborn.

I fell in love with Stoppard's work after Arcadia, and this play is quite literally right up my alley—language, love, and tragedy.

“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.

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.

“At night I hold you fast in my dreams, I run after you across the Field of Mars, I follow you into the tumbling waters, and you show no pity.”

This is a gorgeous play about Victorian poet AE Housman and his memories and reconciliation and love. It explores the literary and scholarly aesthetic movement and its uproot of Victorian morality, and laments the great unrequited love of Housman’s life. Very beautiful and touching, also very funny.

Erudite & emotional, my first Stoppard. Of the life of A. E. Housman (1859-1936) & we are present at his end as he considers his past life & deliberates: of his squandered/ not-squandered (long unknown & never reciprocated) forever love for college chum Moses Jackson; of his life's work editing, translating, studying, academia-ing of the Ancients, i.e. his commitment to the humanities, to scholarship for scholarship's sake.

The easy logic would establish Housman's dusty devotion to scholarship as the bitter symptom of his rebuffed affections for another man (during a time in England when Wilde would be imprisoned several years for 'gross indecency'). "And he ran to the corrupted texts, to the poetry of the pederastic Greeks," so says that logic. Yet Stoppard's never lets Housman's academic career appear colorless, never as some neat and tidy result -- though it is vexed, surely, as all our pleasures are. When chit-chatting with his younger self, the elderly Housman both recommends relaxing his younger self's zeal for study & instead smell outdoor roses & dwell in the present, while continuing to champion the autonomous, & therefore, productive grand cause of scholarship. Why not both? Ah, if only we had more than one life!

& passages from Horace's elegy to the athlete Ligurinas, "To Venus," ['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'] serve to voice Housman's hush-hush desire for this Mo, a runner. Goodness, I cried. For yes there is longing and regret, but more potent: some of the knottiest courage I've ever read.

By this rating, I mean "it was okay for me personally in a bittersweet way, but really might've been fantastic with the right background knowledge or teacher leading me through it". I think this is one of those works that I would have loved with the proper context, but with just a one-time reading (concurrent with viewing), leaves me feeling a bit overwhelmed with a canon I am not familiar with.

As other reviews mention, there are echoes of Arcadia present - in the repetition, in the fluidity of time, in the theme of the passing down of knowledge - though instead of viewing it through the lens of entropy, it is through the lens of the importance of a single word, classics, and translation. Having taken Latin for four years - caring about things like what the future perfect means, or having practiced translation, or knowing about case, all matter - and having taken some high school English classes under teachers who championed the Western Canon (a la Bloom), I was half-prepared to like it. I could glimpse at times - and fully immerse myself at others - in what was being said. But for the average person, I could not recommend it, as it'd come off as a bunch of pretentious nonsense sprinkled with names of literary figures and languages long dead. Even for me, entire scenes felt like they were removed from my understanding, and lost their significance to me.

It's interesting, though, how it makes me think about the significance of a canon - not to perpetuate the old authors per se, but just to keep the line of discourse between past and present alive. Stoppard half-succeeds at reviving Housman for me, someone whose poetry seemed awfully antiquated to me. Putting all his words and lines into the context of his life story really did breathe some life to him, and I felt faintly nostalgic for all the classics I would never really understand. And it saddened me that though I feel my education put me in the upper percentiles for the target audience in terms of references, I still couldn't fully get or immerse myself in it, because that theme is a beautiful one. And while I appreciate the diversity of books I've been exposed to of late, it is a) definitely pleasant to feel like you "get" a reference, and more broadly b) allows people to create a very particular type of work that better connects to its (narrow) intended audience, and it feels harder to assume some collective set of experiences or body of works to reference - perhaps people just shouldn't or don't assume it? but even then, as a reader, finding the things that do this for you is hard. Anyway, just ramblings to myself here.

As a piece illustrating life in a period of time nearly completely foreign to me, I did miss out on lots of the meaning behind various historical references, I'm sure. It felt to me like there was a missed opportunity for...cohesion? to intertwine the above theme with the other main plot point, that of the main character/Housman's unrequited love for his friend, and how part of Greeks' conception of love had become something taboo at the time. It was certainly discussed, and maybe the parallels/connection just went over my head, but the two felt like fairly separate threads in the story.

Overall, I found the elegance of Arcadia's plot much nicer, and as another reviewer mentions, how the main action is offstage there - here, Housman front and center is a bit much at times. But I can see how it is a nice work, and feels ripe for deeper thinking and analysis - but not the lighter reading I was doing on my own.

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.

Stoppard's dilemma as a playwright is usually balancing his very intellectual characters with the subtext and emotion deep underneath their facade of intelligence. The Invention of Love is one of the most interesting balancing acts of this, placed entirely within an academic world and with so many references to classical poetry, 19th century scholars and writers, and even set in the intellectual underworld (complete with Charon!) On the page, and on a first read, it didn't always translate - some diatribes did not reveal the emotion under the surface. When they talked about Ovid and other writers I know somewhat well, I felt in on the club - and when we moved to writers foreign to me, I did not understand or get drawn into the play. However, the second half really came back around for me in its focus on Hausman's complicated love life, which serves as companion to his poetry and analysis of ancient love poems in a uniquely Stoppard way, one that few playwrights can match. Not everything worked for me but I wonder if I'll come back to the play later, either in a production with a fantastic director or with a better dramaturgical understanding of the time period, and find it a masterpiece. For now, it eluded me just enough to prevent me from loving it.

Love Tom Stoppard's work, especially "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" and "Shakespeare in Love." Also loved "The Real Thing." Received this book as a wedding gift and greatly enjoyed it. Would love to see a production of it. It concerns English scholar and poet A.E. Housman reflecting back on his life as he crosses the River Styx. Alternately amusing and profound and sometimes both at the same time. In the end and at the end, profoundly moving.

British men navel gazing about the classics can only take me so far, even if they're repressed homosexuals. But Tom Stoppard is always witty and thought provoking, even in Hades.

I think I already mentioned in one of my other reviews this month I have a theme with the books I read; love obviously. I got this at one of my favorite local used bookstores. I absolutely love plays, especially when the drama plays. This one is no different. This play is such a cleverly ridden play and if you haven’t read it, I highly recommend that you do. if you like Oscar Wilde’s writing he’s a character in this play. Mr. Stoppard out did himself with this one. Because it’s so short I can’t tell you a whole bunch about what it’s about. I can just tell you a man looks back on his life as a whole. Also the ending.??? Bro just freakin read the play… READ IT NOW IMMEDIATELY!!!!! I know about the Invention of Love. Will you?
If my review is not enough to convince you to read this play; here are some quotes I liked

“A genuine love of learning is one of the two delinquencies which cause blindness and lead a young man to ruin.”

“Personally I am in favour of education but a university is not the place for it. A university exists to seek the meaning of life by the pursuit of scholarship.”

“I have announced the meaning of life in my lec-tures. There is nothing beautiful which is not good, and nothing good which has no moral purpose.”

“The conventional morality which requires of us the sacrifice of any one of those moments has no real claim on us. The love of art for art's sake seeks nothing in return except the highest quality to the moments of your life, and simply for those moments' sake.”

“No. What a strange thing is a young man. You had better be a poet. Literary enthusiasm never made a scholar, and unmade many. Taste is not knowledge.”

“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. It's all in the timing. In Homer, Achilles and Patroclus were com-rades, brave and pure of stain.”


“Love it is, then, and I will make the best of it.
I'm sorry that it made you unhappy, but it's not my fault, and it can't be made good by unhappiness in another.”

“She thinks you're sweet on me.”
Jackson I said it was nonsense. We're chums.”

“Housman: We’ll still be friends, won't we?”

Of course Rosa knew! — of course she'd know!
Jackson Oh!
Housman Did you really not know even for a minute?
Jackson How could I know? You seem just like ... you know, normal. You're not one of those Aesthete types or anything - (angrily) how could I know?!
Housman You mean if I dressed like the Three Musketeers you'd have suspected?
“You're half my life.”


“Chums since Oxford, you, me and Pollard.
Housman Did she think Pollard was sweet on you?
Jackson She didn't talk about Pollard. You're not, are you, Hous?
Housman You're my best friend.
Jackson That's what I said, like ...
Housman Theseus and Pirithous.
Jackson The Three Musketeers.
Housman What did she say?
Jackson She hasn't read it. “


“After that day, everything else seemed futile and ridiculous: the ridiculous idea that one's life was poised on the reading course • ••”

“Housman
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.”

“It's a courtesy. Confession is an act of violence against the unoffending. Can you see the bonfires? It's the old Queen's Diamond Jubilee. I was a Victorian poet, don't forget.”

“On the contrary, it's only fact. Truth is quite another thing and is the work of the imagination.”

“Art deals with exceptions, not with types. Facts deal only with types. Here was the type of young man who shoots himself. He read about someone shooting himself in the Evening News, so he shot himself in the Evening Standard.”

“Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biog-raphy, and biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes. “

“The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me.”

“besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our inven-tion. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made - the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go.”

“AEH No. My life is marked by long silences.”

“I'm very sorry. Your life is a terrible thing. A chronological error. The choice was not always between renunciation and folly.”

“I took charge of my own myth.
I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new-….”

“Just recently. They were real people to each other, that's the thing. They knew each other's poems. They knew each other's girls. Virgil puts it all in a Golden Age with pan-pipes and goatherds, and Apollo there in person
- but you can trust it, that's what I mean. Real people in real love, baring their souls in poetry that made their mistresses immortal! - and it all happened in such a short span. As if all the poetry till then had to pass through a bottleneck where a handful of poets were waiting to see what could be done with it. And then it was over, the love poem complete, love as it really is.”

“Pollard: It’s time to go.”

“AEH: I would have died for you but I never had the luck!”

“When thou art kind I spend the day like a god; when thy face is turned aside, it is very dark with me. I shall give thee wings. Thou shalt be a song sung unto posterity so long as earth and sun abide. And when thou comest to go down to the lamentable house of Hades, never - albeit thou be dead - shalt thou lose thy fame.”

i don’t have the words to describe this yet i just know it is now my favorite play of all time