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?