The Invention of Love

The Invention of Love
Cover of the Grove Press edition
Written by	Tom Stoppard
Characters	A. E. Housman Alfred W. Pollard Charon John Ruskin Benjamin Jowett Jerome K. Jerome Henry Labouchere W. T. Stead Frank Harris Robinson Ellis John Postgate Walter Pater Oscar Wilde
Date premiered	October 1, 1997
Original language	English
Subject	A. E. Housman
Genre	Drama
Setting	The river Styx

The Invention of Love is a 1997 play by Tom Stoppard portraying the life of poet A. E. Housman, focusing specifically on his personal life and love for a college classmate. The play is written from the viewpoint of Housman, dealing with his memories at the end of his life, and contains many classical allusions. The Invention of Love received both the Evening Standard Award (U.K.) and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award (U.S.) for Best Play.

Considered by many to be Stoppard's finest play, it has been called "esoteric". In fact, to demystify the play's many historical and academic references, the New York production team provided the audiences with a 30-page booklet on the political and artistic history of the late-Victorian period.Harold Bloom, a scholar of Walter Pater, contends that the character of Housman and those in his circle are fabulated for dramatic effect, and the play's difficulties are not historical but its own. This clarified, he cited it in 2003 as Stoppard's "masterpiece to date".

The play begins with A. E. Housman, dead at age 77, standing on the bank of the river Styx. About to board the ferry to the afterlife – captained by a petulant Charon – Housman begins to remember moments from his life, starting with his matriculation at Oxford University, where he studied Classics. The play unfolds in short scenes that trace, primarily, Housman's relationship with Moses Jackson, for whom he harboured a lifelong unrequited love. The scenes also explore late-Victorian artistic ideals, and Housman's intellectual growth into a preeminent Latin textual scholar. Throughout the play, the older Housman comments on and occasionally talks to the characters, including his younger self.

The play premièred at the Cottesloe Theatre in the Royal National Theatre, London, on 25 September 1997, moved later into the larger Lyttelton Theatre, and then transferred to the Haymarket Theatre in 1998. The old Housman was played by John Wood and the young Housman by Paul Rhys. The director was Richard Eyre. The production won the 1997 Evening Standard Award for Best Play.