The Invention of Love centers on the life of A E Housman, the famous poet and scholar. In the play, an old Housman dreams that he is dead. As Charon, the mythical boatman, ferries him across the River Styx, Housman returns to the Oxford of his youth where he fell in love with scholarship and with his fellow student, Moses Jackson. Stoppard’s dream world includes Victorian London, where Parliament made homosexuality a crime, and the French seashore, where Oscar Wilde--convicted of that very crime--is living out his final days.