Status
Available
Call number
Genres
Collection
Publication
Grove Press (1998), Edition: 1st Grove Press, 112 pages
Description
It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories are dramatically alive. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student called Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene. On his journey the scholar and poet who is now the elder Housman confronts his younger self, and the memories of the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson-the handsome athlete who could not return his feelings. As if a dream, The Invention of Love inhabits Housman's imagination, illuminating both the pain of hopeless love and passion displaced into poetry and the study of classical texts. The author of A Shropshire Lad lived almost invisibly in the shadow of the flamboyant Oscar Wilde, and died old and venerated-but whose passion was truly the fatal one?… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member veevoxvoom
It’s about the aesthetic movement. It’s about academia. It’s about memory. It’s about Greek and Roman classics. It’s about homosexuality. Also, it’s about love.
The Invention of Love begins with A.E Hausman, who has just died at the age of seventy-seven and is now standing on the shores
I adored this play. I’ve read Stoppard before but was never really crazy about him until The Invention of Love. I think it’s because in his other plays I didn’t always get a sense of humanity, but in this one it really rings true. Hausman’s longing for Jackson is a pang in your chest, and I enjoyed his passion and comments on the nature of translating ancient texts. This is a play built on nostalgia– Hausman recreates perfect images of Oxford and Jackson and uncorrupted Latin texts–, which Stoppard also explores. Like nostalgia, it has a vein of melancholy running right through its heart. It recalls a sense of the golden age and of the fin de siecle, which makes it all the more haunting.
The Invention of Love begins with A.E Hausman, who has just died at the age of seventy-seven and is now standing on the shores
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of Hades. As he speaks to the boatman Charon, the elder Hausman looks out at the river and sees in it memories of his past, especially his education at Oxford and his unrequited love for one of his Oxford friends, Moses Jackson. Past and present combine, as well as musings on the nature of art and academics, mixed with a healthy dab of classical references (Hausman was best known as a Latin scholar).I adored this play. I’ve read Stoppard before but was never really crazy about him until The Invention of Love. I think it’s because in his other plays I didn’t always get a sense of humanity, but in this one it really rings true. Hausman’s longing for Jackson is a pang in your chest, and I enjoyed his passion and comments on the nature of translating ancient texts. This is a play built on nostalgia– Hausman recreates perfect images of Oxford and Jackson and uncorrupted Latin texts–, which Stoppard also explores. Like nostalgia, it has a vein of melancholy running right through its heart. It recalls a sense of the golden age and of the fin de siecle, which makes it all the more haunting.
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LibraryThing member languagehat
How can anyone who loves classics not love this play? "There is truth and falsehood in a comma. ... By taking out a comma and putting it back in a different place, sense is made out of nonsense in a poem that has been read continuously since it was first misprinted four hundred years ago. A small
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victory over ignorance and error. A scrap of knowledge to add to our stock." Show Less
LibraryThing member ellen.w
A friend told me to read this, and I shall be eternally grateful. I loved it. It gets four stars instead of five simply because I use five for enduring favorites, and I've only read this once.
LibraryThing member iayork
The Invention of Love Poetry: It opened in 1997, and the wind it brought to Los Angeles said, "Mr. Housman was queer." Well, no, the play says no such thing, these are not the memoirs of an old queen, although none other than Oscar Wilde is brought on toward the end as a figment of Housman's
It's all a game, but it grows more and more unstoppered until you have the real sense that Stoppard has let the play loose entirely: shame and confusion reign as Wilde is mocked (this is prepared with dazzling and daring care by introducing Bunthorne from Patience with the famous satire), until, in the best piece of writing Stoppard has produced, Housman unweaves the mess in the end.
The famous opening of Jumpers, involving a lady on a swing and a waiter with a tray, either has nothing on this, or amounts to what it all adds up to.
The Grove Press edition, which features on its back cover the pointed assertion that I am wrong and the wind had it right all along, rather humorously contains small alternate insertions (in parentheses) from the Royal National Theatre production, which give the text the incidental look of a variorum.
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imagination to retail such goods in a shocking representation that puts me ahead of myself in this piece.The actual subject of the play is the invention of love poetry by Propertius (or some other Roman poet) twenty centuries ago. This proceeds as a philological examination backwards, naturally, against an imaginary representation of Housman's life in his mind. The entire point is to create a simulacrum of emotions reflecting the condition of Propertius, by generating an elaborate masterpiece of artificial construction toying rather dangerously with the real.It's all a game, but it grows more and more unstoppered until you have the real sense that Stoppard has let the play loose entirely: shame and confusion reign as Wilde is mocked (this is prepared with dazzling and daring care by introducing Bunthorne from Patience with the famous satire), until, in the best piece of writing Stoppard has produced, Housman unweaves the mess in the end.
The famous opening of Jumpers, involving a lady on a swing and a waiter with a tray, either has nothing on this, or amounts to what it all adds up to.
The Grove Press edition, which features on its back cover the pointed assertion that I am wrong and the wind had it right all along, rather humorously contains small alternate insertions (in parentheses) from the Royal National Theatre production, which give the text the incidental look of a variorum.
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LibraryThing member dbarn
A truly brilliant play that can't be fully appreciated from just reading it. It plays beautifully on stage, which is where it all really belongs.
LibraryThing member Devil_llama
Reading this play makes me realize what some people feel like when reading or watching a Tom Stoppard play about math and science - a bit lost at times, as the scholarly language of someone else's specialty washes over you and you say Enough Already! This play about A. E. Housman sounded much more
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interesting than it is. It purports to be about his unrequited love for an athlete with whom he was friends in school, but in reality it appears to be much more about the field of literary criticism and reconstruction of ancient Greek and Latin texts. Many of the conversations feel much more like university lectures than dramatic action, but the introduction of Charon helps to add some interest. Unfortunately, there is very little Charon and a great deal of Oxford academics talking about why this or that translation from the Latin or Greek is more accurate. This is not the stuff of plays, though there were admittedly some very good lines at times, though not in keeping with what one would expect of Tom Stoppard. Overall, not a must read. Show Less
Awards
Tony Award (Nominee — Play — 2001)
New York Drama Critics' Circle Award (Play — 2000-2001)
Language
Original language
English
Original publication date
1997
Physical description
112 p.; 8.5 inches
ISBN
9780802135810