Classicists know A.E. Housman as the most brilliant Latinist of the late Victorian era. General readers—if they know of Housman at all today—know him as a poet, author of A Shropshire Lad, a set of elegiac poems about young men and missed chances.
Tom Stoppard’s moving play about Housman explores this divided self—romantic poet and scrupulous scholar—pulled between two passions: one for scholarship, the other for a more forbidden love. He does this in part by putting two versions of his protagonist on stage.
There’s the elderly Housman (“AEH”), first seen bantering with the mythical boatman Charon and then encountering his younger self as he takes an imaginative voyage across the Styx, revisiting memories as he nears the end of his life. And there’s the younger self (“Housman”), the university student passionately devoted to classical scholarship—and to his roommate Moses Jackson.
