The Invention of Love

It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories, however, are dramatically alive. The river flowing through this play connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's early manhood, where high Victorianism in art, literature and morality is being challenged by the aesthetic movement and an Irish student called Wilde is about to burst onto the scene. By century's end, the poet and scholar Housman, the greatest, most caustic and wittiest classicist of his time, has secured his reputation in the sixty three poems collected in A Shropshire Lad. The Invention of Love uses the free form of memory to give a sympatric account of Housman in the age of Oscar Wilde, and it asks whose passion was really the fatal one?