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Salome
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Salome (or in French: Salomé ) is a tragedy by
Oscar Wilde. The original 1891 version of the play was
in French. Three years later an English translation was
published. The play tells in one act the Biblical story of
Salome, stepdaughter of the tetrarch Herod Antipas, who, to
her stepfather's dismay but to the delight of her mother
Herodias, requests the head of Jokanaan (John the Baptist)
on a silver platter as a reward for dancing the Dance of the
Seven Veils.
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Salome (Greek: Σαλωμη, Salōmē), the
Daughter of Herodias (c AD 14 - between 62 and
71), is known from the New Testament (Mark
6:17-29 and Matt 14:3-11, where, however, her
name is not given). Another source from
Antiquity, Flavius Josephus's Jewish
Antiquities, gives her name and some detail
about her family relations.
Name in Hebrew reads שלומית (Shlomit) and is
derived from Shalom שלום, meaning "peace".
Christian traditions depict her as an icon of
dangerous female seductiveness, for instance
depicting as erotic her dance mentioned in the
New Testament (in some later transformations
further iconised to the dance of the seven
veils), or concentrate on her lighthearted and
cold foolishness that, according to the gospels,
led to John the Baptist's death.
A new ramification was added by Oscar Wilde,
who in his play Salome let her degenerate into a
necrophiliac, killed the same day as the man
whose death she had requested. This last
interpretation, made even more memorable by
Richard Strauss's opera based on Wilde, is not
consistent with Josephus's account; according to
the Romanized Jewish historian, she lived long
enough to marry twice and raise several
children. Few literary accounts elaborate the
biographical data given by Josephus.
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Rehearsals for the play's debut on the London stage
began in 1892, but were halted when the Lord Chamberlain's
licensor of plays banned Salomé on the basis that it was
illegal to depict Biblical characters on the stage. The play
was first published in French in 1893, and an English
translation, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, in
1894. On the Dedication page, Wilde indicated that his lover
Lord Alfred Douglas was the translator. In fact, Wilde and
Douglas had quarrelled over the latter's translation of the
text which had been nothing short of disastrous given his
poor mastery of French — though Douglas claimed that the
errors were really in Wilde's original play. Beardsley and
the publisher John Lane got drawn in when they sided with
Wilde. In a gesture of reconciliation, Wilde did the work
himself but dedicated Douglas as the translator rather than
having them sharing their names on the title-page. Douglas
compared a dedication to sharing the title-page as "the
difference between a tribute of admiration from an artist
and a receipt from a tradesman."
The play eventually premiered in Paris in 1896, while
Wilde was in prison. When asked why he had chosen to write
Salomé in French, Wilde cited Maeterlinck as an example of
the interesting effect resulting when an author writes in a
language not his own.
Maud Allan as Salomé with the head of John the Baptist in
an early adaptation of Wilde's play
In June 1906 the play was presented privately with A
Florentine Tragedy by the Literary Theatre Society at King's
Hall, Covent Garden. The Lord Chamberlain's ban was not
lifted for almost forty years; the first public performance
of Salomé in England was at the Savoy Theatre on October 5,
1931.
In 1992 the play was performed on Broadway at the Circle
in the Square Theatre, under the direction of Robert Allan
Ackerman. Sheryl Lee starred as the title role alongside Al
Pacino. The play costarred Suzanne Bertish, Esai Morales and
Arnold Vosloo.
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