The Work
Salomé was written in French in 1891 and first published by Librairie de l'Art Indépendant (Paris) in 1893, with an English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas (with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley) published by Elkin Mathews and John Lane (London) in 1894. The play was banned in Britain by the Lord Chamberlain on the grounds that it depicted biblical characters - a ban on the dramatization of Scripture then in force - before its London production could proceed. It was first performed in Paris in 1896 and in London in 1905, the same year Richard Strauss's opera based on the play premiered in Dresden.
The play is a one-act drama in a single scene, set on the terrace of Herod Antipas's palace overlooking a cistern in which John the Baptist (called Jokanaan in the play) is imprisoned. The characters are Herod, his wife Herodias (whose marriage to her former brother-in-law John has condemned), their stepdaughter Salomé, Jokanaan himself (audible from the cistern), and a group of soldiers and courtiers. The play covers approximately the final hours before Salomé's dance, through the dance and her demand for the Baptist's head, to her death at Herod's command.
Wilde's source is the Gospel accounts of the death of John the Baptist (Matthew 14:1-12, Mark 6:14-29), but his transformation of the source is radical. In the Gospels, Salomé's dance and her demand for the Baptist's head are presented as the scheme of her mother Herodias, who uses her daughter as an instrument. In Wilde's play, Salomé is an independent agent driven by her own obsessive desire: she has become fascinated with Jokanaan, approached him directly, been rebuffed, and now demands his head as an act of possession. The biblical account's political crime (silencing a prophet) becomes in Wilde an erotic crime.
Biblical Engagement
Matthew 14:8 - 'And she, being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger' - is the Gospel account that Wilde inverts. In Matthew, the demand is the mother's, communicated through a compliant daughter. Wilde removes the mother's agency and makes Salomé the independent desirer: the demand for the head is her own expression of an obsessive love that cannot have its object living. The inversion transforms a story about political revenge into a story about erotic possession - and about the danger of beauty and desire when unchecked by moral law.
Mark 6:25 - 'And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist' - is Mark's version, which Wilde follows more closely than Matthew's in giving Salomé the initiative. The 'with haste' (a detail characteristic of Mark's urgency) becomes in Wilde's Salomé a rushing, consuming passion that does not deliberate.
Matthew 3:4 - 'And the same John had his raiment of camel's hair, and a leathern girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey' - is Matthew's description of the Baptist's ascetic appearance, which Wilde develops into Salomé's catalogue of Jokanaan's physical features: his white body, his black hair, his red mouth. Salomé's speeches cataloguing Jokanaan's body draw on the language of the Song of Songs - the beloved's body praised in terms of natural objects - but invert the Song's mutual desire into a one-sided obsession, and invert the ascetic's self-denial into the object of erotic fixation.
Author and Context
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) wrote Salomé in Paris in 1891, at the height of his career. He was at the center of the Aesthetic Movement and associated with Symbolism, Decadence, and the fin-de-siècle preoccupation with beauty, corruption, and the relationship between art and morality. The play reflects his reading of Maeterlinck's Symbolist drama, Flaubert's Hérodias (1877), and the visual art tradition of Salomé paintings (Moreau, Klimt, Beardsley).
The religious dimension of the play is genuine despite its transgressive surface. Wilde was deeply fascinated with Catholicism - he converted on his deathbed - and the play's liturgical rhythms (its incantatory prose, its repeated refrains) suggest a religious sensibility that finds expression in inverted form. Jokanaan is the prophet whose voice condemns the corruption around him; Salomé is the corruption that silences the voice. The moon imagery that pervades the play - Salomé is compared to the moon repeatedly, and the moon changes color as the drama proceeds - suggests a symbolic language of spiritual states beyond the merely decorative.
Symbolic Aesthetics
Wilde's prose in Salomé is written in a highly formalized, incantatory French that Beardsley's illustrations perfectly complement. The repetitive, liturgical rhythms - 'I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. I will kiss thy mouth' - create a hypnotic effect that draws the audience into Salomé's obsession rather than distancing them from it. This is the Symbolist technique: the symbol does not represent meaning but generates it, and the audience receives the meaning directly rather than through explanation.
The religious inversions are pervasive. The prophet who speaks truth becomes the object of desire; the voice that condemns becomes the voice that attracts; the severed head that should symbolize martyrdom and witness becomes the object of Salomé's final kiss. Wilde transforms the Christian martyr narrative into a pagan rite of erotic triumph - a transformation that his contemporaries found scandalous and that has continued to disturb and fascinate.
Critical Reception
The play was banned in Britain and received mixed reviews in France. Bernard Shaw admired it; others found it merely shocking. Strauss's opera (1905), which extended Wilde's text (in its German translation by Hedwig Lachmann) into a ninety-minute musical experience of extraordinary power, definitively established the cultural status of the work. The opera is now a staple of the operatic repertoire.
Contempory scholarship has found in the play an engagement with gender, desire, and power that goes beyond its decadent surface. Feminist critics have read Salomé's demand for the Baptist's head as a transgressive assertion of female desire in a world that routinely sacrifices women to male desire; the play, on this reading, inverts rather than simply enacts the misogynist femme fatale tradition.
Theological Significance
The play's theological significance lies in what it reveals about the relationship between the sacred and the erotic - a relationship that the biblical tradition itself acknowledges (the Song of Songs; the prophets' use of erotic imagery for the relationship between God and Israel) but tends to carefully manage. Wilde removes the management and allows the relationship to become transgressive: the holy man becomes the desired object, and the desire that should be directed toward God is directed toward the prophet.
The silencing of the prophetic voice - Jokanaan in the cistern, Jokanaan's head on a platter - is also a theological statement. The voice that speaks uncomfortable truth is most in danger from those most threatened by it, and the instruments of its silencing are not always rational opposition but desire, obsession, and the irrational force of the passions.
Legacy
The play has generated a tradition of artistic works: Beardsley's illustrations are among the most celebrated Art Nouveau works; Strauss's opera has introduced Wilde's text to millions of listeners; and the figure of Salomé has become one of the most widely treated subjects in modernist and post-modernist art. Wilde's transformation of the biblical episode permanently altered how the story is received: for many readers and audiences, the independent, desiring Salomé has displaced the daughter-as-instrument of the Gospels.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Matthew 14:1-12 (the death of John the Baptist), Mark 6:14-29 (the full account in Mark), Matthew 11:2-19 (Jesus's assessment of John's significance), and Leviticus 18:16 (the law John cited against Herod's marriage).
Further Reading
- Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987) - the standard biography, with excellent treatment of the play's composition and reception. - Gail Finney, Women in Modern Drama: Freud, Feminism, and European Theater at the Turn of the Century (1989) - places Salomé in the context of fin-de-siècle representations of women. - Lawrence Kramer, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (2004) - treats the Strauss opera and its transformation of Wilde's text.