‘Salomé’ is a one-act tragedy by Oscar Wilde. Wilde wrote it in French and the French version (title ‘Salomé’, with an accent) was published in Paris in 1893. Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, then translated it into English and this version (title ‘Salom’ without the accent) was published in London in 1894.
Setting
The play is set at the time of Jesus in the Roman province of Judaea i.e. around 30 AD and is based on contemporary sources, namely references in the New Testament and the history of Josephus.
John the Baptist – referred to throughout by the archaic name Jokanaan – has been arrested by officers of King Herod. His full historical name was Herod Antipas (21 BC to 39 AD) and he was the son of Herod the Great. Herod Antipas was tetrarch (ruler of a minor principality in the Roman Empire) of Galilee in northern Palestine, and Peraea east of the Jordan River and Dead Sea.
Anyway, this Herod is very aware that:
- he only rules with the permission of the Roman emperor who, during Jesus’s ministry, was the Emperor Tiberius (ruled 14 to 37 AD)
- he must implement Roman laws and, especially, taxes, while at the same time trying to manage the often restive and even rebellious Jewish population of Judaea
These issues occur in Wilde’s play where a) Herod is made to boast about his friendship with the emperor and admire him despite his gout; and b) to mock the ruler of the neighbouring Roman province, the King of Cappadocia; and c) there is a kind of chorus of Jewish voices heard offstage which periodically interrupt and comment on the action (‘What an uproar! Who are those wild beasts howling?’ ‘The Jews. They are always like that. They are disputing about their religion’) who then accompany Herod and the court onstage half way through the action and carry on an extended digression into the precise status of the Baptist and then of the alleged Messias (as the play spells it) who everyone is talking about.
Herod and Herodias
But all this is just background to the central action of the play which is pretty straightforward. Herod has married Herodias, the wife of his brother (Herod II). Herod had had Herod II arrested and imprisoned for 12 years before he was eventually strangled on his orders. It was John the Baptist’s relentless criticism of these acts as incest and against Jewish law (‘the prophet says that our marriage is not a true marriage, he says that it is a marriage of incest, a marriage that will bring evils’) which prompted Herod to have him arrested. The play is set thus:
A great terrace in the Palace of Herod, set above the banqueting-hall. Some soldiers are leaning over the balcony. To the right there is a gigantic staircase, to the left, at the back, an old cistern surrounded by a wall of green bronze. The moon is shining very brightly.
Improbably and strangely, Herod has got John-Jokanaan imprisoned in this ‘old cistern’. It’s a solution to the dramatic problem Wilde gave himself which is that he wants the voice of Jokanaan, quoting Biblical prophecies and curses, to be able to come in at various points, commenting on the dialogue of Herod and his family, and allowing the latter, in their turn, to execrate Jokanaan. He has to be onstage so as to do this, but at the same time clearly imprisoned and so this rather unconventional ‘cistern’ setup is the solution. This is what Jokanaan sounds like:
The voice of Jokanaan: After me shall come another mightier than I. I am not worthy so much as to unloose the latchet of his shoes. When he cometh, the solitary places shall be glad. They shall blossom like the rose. The eyes of the blind shall see the day, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened. The suckling child shall put his hand upon the dragon’s lair, he shall lead the lions by their manes.
Salome
Anyway, we finally arrive at the character of Salome herself. So Herod and his new wife, Herodias, are in their 40s. Herodias brought to the marriage her daughter by her first husband, the very attractive and nubile (18, 20-year-old?) Salome. So Salome is Herod’s step-daughter. And through the first half of the play it becomes clear that Herod cannot take his eyes off her. He is obviously looking at her in an obsessive if not lascivious way. We know this because the angry, jealous mother, Herodias, comments on it continually. And he’s not the only one. Wilde has the captain of Herod’s guard (‘a young Syrian’) also watching Salome obsessively, despite the warnings of his friend, the page of Herodias, that he shouldn’t.
The core event in the play is that Salome, wandering off from Herod’s dinner party, hears the voice of Jokanaan coming from the cistern and is lazily, sensually intrigued, looks down into its black depths and finds herself perversely, sensuously, cruelly attracted to the dirty ragged figure of Jokanaan in his cistern. She bullies Herod’s captain of the guard, Narraboth, into opening the cistern so that the prophet can emerge, and she can see him and touch him.
Jokanaan appears, denouncing Herodias and her husband. At first frightened by the sight of the holy man, Salome becomes fascinated by him, begging him to let her touch his hair, his skin and kiss his mouth. When she tells him she is Herodias’s daughter he calls her a ‘daughter of Sodom’, tells her to scatter ashes on her head and seek out the Son of Man.
All Salome’s attempts to attract him fail, he swears she will never kiss his mouth, cursing her as the daughter of an adulteress and advising her to seek the Lord.
At this point in a bizarre and excessive event, the young captain of the guard, unable to bear Salome’s desire for another man, fatally stabs himself and falls right between Salome and Jokanaan. What makes it especially bizarre is that Salome ignores this and carries on her futile requests for the Baptist to let her kiss him, ‘Suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan’ until the Baptist, in disgust, returns to his cistern.
At which point Herod, Herodias, their courtiers and their Roman guest, Tigellinus, enter from the feast they’ve been having offstage. Herod is struck by the odd appearance of the moon but slips in the blood of the dead captain, correctly seeing this as a bad omen, and indeed the captain’s blood obviously adds to the macabre and decadent atmosphere.
His servants set up the table and feast and Herod invites Salome to come drink some wine or eat some fruit with him, which she refuses. Jokanaan delivers a broadside and Herodias asks Herod why he doesn’t hand the troublesome man over to the Jews who’ve been clamouring for him for 6 months but Herod refuses, maintaining that Jokanaan is a holy man and has seen God.
His words spark a digression, an argument among the Jews attending the court concerning the true nature of God and whether Jokanaan is the reincarnation of the prophet Elias. Others explain to Herod that Jokanaan is describing the advent of the Jewish Messiah and some men from Nazareth describe the miracles of Jesus such as turning water into wine and healing lepers and raising a girl from the dead. Herod approves of healing lepers, that sounds socially useful, but disapproves of raising the dead, that sounds like a bad idea.
Herod: Let them find Him, and tell Him, thus saith Herod the King, ‘I will not suffer Thee to raise the dead!’ To change water into wine, to heal the lepers and the blind. . . . He may do these things if He will. I say nothing against these things. In truth I hold it a kindly deed to heal a leper. But no man shall raise the dead. It would be terrible if the dead came back.
After this digression about Jesus Herod’s attention wanders back to Salome who he’s been staring at and he asks her to dance for him. Salome plays on Herod’s obvious obsession with her and tempts and goads him into promising her anything, all the riches and rare jewels in his treasury, even half of his kingdom, if she will dance for him. Herod, virtually drooling, agrees that he will give her anything she desires and so Salome dances a strange barbaric dance, which Wilde calls The Dance of the Seven Veils. Apparently this is Wilde’s invention and his main contribution to what was, of course, a well-known Bible story.
Having made Herod’s day by performing what, in the productions I’ve seen, is a very sensual and provocative striptease for Herod, she then forces him to fulfil his promise and names her price, which is the head of Jokanaan, for Jokanaan to be executed. Herod is shocked and horrified because, although he’s had Jokanaan arrested:
- he is a popular figure, whose religious prophecies have won him a large following and strike a chord with many Jews, many of whom claim he is the reincarnation of Elias the Old Testament prophets – so killing him will alienate many of Herod’s people
- Herod himself feels the force of Jokanaan’s integrity and trembles to harm such an obviously holy man who ‘has seen God’
- Herod is also uneasily aware of the figure Jokanaan keeps referring to, the Messias (as it is spelt here), the Son of Man, the one who has come to judge the world, and worried what will happen about him if Jokanaan is harmed
Which is why Herod spends a couple of pages listing everything else he will give Salome rather than Jokannan’s head but Salome is absolutely inflexible. Herod agonises but decides a king must keep his promise, especially a promise made in front of the whole court, courtiers and attendants who fill the stage. And so he gives the ring of death to a servant to hand to the Executioner, Namaan (‘a huge Negro’) who goes down into the cistern and chops Jokanaan’s head off. Up from the cistern comes a hand holding a tray on which is the freshly severed head still dripping blood.
Salome takes the tray and delivers a cruel and sensual soliloquy to the head which leads up to her kissing the severed head on the lips. Disgusted, Herod orders his courtiers to pack up the feast and leave the room, dousing the lamps.
The last event of the play is that, as he climbs the staircase to leave, Herod turns and sees Salome holding Jokanaan’s head so close that she has kissed it and now, thoroughly disgusted by the same young woman who, only ten minutes earlier he was lusting after, orders his soldiers to kill her, and the soldiers rush forward and crush her beneath their shields.
Presumably there’s a fair bit of screaming and squelching but this isn’t mentioned in the stage directions for ‘Kill that woman!’ are the play’s last words and the lights go out as they crush Salome to death.
Salome in contemporary literature and art
Wilde had been considering the subject of Salome since his undergraduate days at Oxford when Walter Pater introduced him to Flaubert’s story Hérodias in 1877. The biographer Peter Raby comments that Wilde’s interest had been further stimulated by descriptions of Gustave Moreau’s paintings of Salome as described in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel À rebours, by Heinrich Heine’s Atta Troll, Jules Laforgue’s Salomé in his ‘Moralités Légendaires’ and Stéphane Mallarmé’s Hérodiade. Not exactly an obscure subject, then. In fact getting on for being a cliché of the period.
Wilde never saw the play produced. The only performances given in his lifetime were in 1896, by which time he was serving a prison sentence for illegal homosexual activity. The play was first given, in the original French, in a one-off performance on 11 February 1896 by the Théâtre de l’Œuvre company at the Théâtre de la Comédie-Parisienne.
Historically, Wilde’s play was overshadowed by the opera written by Richard Strauss. Strauss’s opera was directly inspired by Wilde’s play which he saw in Berlin in 1902. He began to compose his opera in summer 1903, and completed and premiered it in 1905.
A blunt way of comparing the two is to say that Strauss’s music very powerfully conveys a sense of barbaric decadence, sensuality and depravity, in a way that Wilde’s prose poetry very much doesn’t.
Comments
Hard work
There’s more to comment on and analyse in ‘Salome’ than there is to enjoy. It’s more of a chore to read than the four comedies which are, obviously, worlds away, and this is reflected in its performance history. ‘Salome’ was occasionally performed in private theatres in Britain until given a licence in 1931 to be publicly performed but has never enjoyed a high reputation. It is treated more as an oddity, as a literary work to be read rather than a piece of drama.
Indebtedness
Critics noted at the time and ever since that Wilde’s play:
- it is heavily indebted to Flaubert’s 1877 story Herodias
- it echoes and repeats phrases and metaphors from French poets
Thus missing the broader point that it is most heavily indebted of all, like most symbolist works, to its basis in Christian legend and theology, so obvious that it’s often not mentioned.
An English symbolist play
‘Salome’ is a rare instance of an English symbolist play although it is symptomatic that it was written in French and first performed in France. It is heavily indebted to the north European movement of symbolism, and to symbolist drama as epitomised in the very recently completed and performed Axël by French writer Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1890).
It is symbolist in at least the following ways:
- the setting is stylised and unnaturalistic
- the dialogue is not intended to be realistic but is highly formalised, for example the way characters repeat the same lines
- these lines are themselves often not dramatic in the sense of conveying what characters are thinking or doing, but a) descriptive, designed to convey atmosphere, as in the repeated descriptions of the changing appearance of the moon throughout the play or b) repetition for its own sake to create an incantatory quality, as in the formal repetitions of religious ceremonies for example the Christian liturgy
And it uses potent symbols which are laboriously repeated to create the sense of ominousness and doom.
The moon The changing appearance of the moon (mentioned 31 times), as described by the characters and as demanded by stage directions, is maybe the most obvious one.
Blood Then the importance of blood (mentioned 16 times), very crudely and obviously spilled all over the stage when the young captain, grotesquely, eviscerates himself on stage, referred to again and again in speeches, and then literally brought on a second time when the head of Jokanaan is presented, still dripping with arterial blood.
Wings Less gruesomely, Herod refers repeatedly to hearing the wings (10 times), as if of some giant bird or maybe the angel of death flapping overhead.
White And Wilde obsessively refers to the colour white (16 times).
She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet…She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver…Her little white hands are fluttering like doves that fly to their dove-cots. They are like white butterflies. They are just like white butterflies…Thy little feet will be like white doves. They will be like little white flowers that dance upon the trees…
And from Salome’s hymn of lust to Jokanaan:
Thy body is white like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed. Thy body is white like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judaea, and come down into the valleys. The roses in the garden of the Queen of Arabia are not so white as thy body…There is nothing in the world so white as thy body.
Maybe because pure unstained white is rare in nature and so white is a very unnatural colour. And also white hands, feet and flesh were symbols of unnatural purity in a place and time (first century Judaea) where most people would be nut brown by natural complexion, plus being labourers exposed to the sun. It is white rather than gold in the play which denotes rarity and value. And then, again, all this mention of lilywhite skin makes all the more shocking the contrast with the red blood of first the Syrian captain and then Jokanaan.
White was the talismanic colour for the symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé who places a white swan at the centre of his 1866 poem about Salome, Hérodiade.
Orientalism
I’ve written a detailed critique (in three parts) of Edward Said’s famous and important book Orientalism which, as long ago as 1978, argued that the academic study of the Muslim Middle East and North Africa, from the late 1700s onwards, provided stereotypes of Eastern decadence, barbarism, laziness, illiteracy and so on, which the imperial powers (mainly Britain and France) then used to justify their rule over the ‘backward’ peoples of the region for nearly 200 years, throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries.
Well, ‘Salome’ is a prime culprit, a classic example of the orientalism Said detected and criticised in so much Victorian literature, ethnography and political discourse. It barely needs to be pointed out how it took whatever Biblical sources existed and transfigured them into an orgy of orientalising stereotypes and clichés, from the lustful ruler to the cruel and sensual young beauty etc etc. The decadent movement sought out images of extravagant luxury, sensuality and cruelty and ‘the Orient’ was a very convenient place to locate them (compare and contrast the use of orientalising tropes in Wilde’s surprisingly violent fairy story, ‘The Fisherman and His Soul‘).
Douglas’s translation
I read ‘Salome’ in the English translation by Wilde’s boy lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, and it is bad. Hopefully the original French is mellifluous and flowing but this English translation is poor. Hardly anywhere does it have the flowing rhythm you associate with Wilde’s prose in his essays and especially in the wonderful fairy stories. The prose here is very run-of-the-mill, sometimes descending into bathetic everyday phrases, sometimes just poor quality, fake Bible tones, or fake Shakespeare, as here with ‘I know not what it means’ and then ‘Of a truth…’
SALOME: I will not stay. I cannot stay. Why does the Tetrarch look at me all the while with his mole’s eyes under his shaking eyelids? It is strange that the husband of my mother looks at me like that. I know not what it means. Of a truth I know it too well.
Douglas’s sparkle-free translation reveals the banality of the technique of repetition which Wilde deployed to try and build up his effects. The opening lines are typical:
THE PAGE OF HERODIAS: Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.
THE YOUNG SYRIAN: She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are of silver. She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet. One might fancy she was dancing.
THE PAGE OF HERODIAS: She is like a woman who is dead. She moves very slowly.
Or take the repetition of the colour symbolism in Salome’s long speeches to and about Jokanaan:
SALOME: It is his eyes above all that are terrible. They are like black holes burned by torches in a tapestry of Tyre. They are like the black caverns of Egypt in which the dragons make their lairs. They are like black lakes troubled by fantastic moons
That’s fairly ornate repetition – elsewhere there’s just flat, bucket reiteration:
FIRST SOLDIER: The Tetrarch has a sombre aspect.
SECOND SOLDIER: Yes; he has a sombre aspect.
FIRST SOLDIER: He is looking at something.
SECOND SOLDIER: He is looking at someone.
This phrase (‘He is looking at someone’) is repeated later, just before Salome dances for Herod, with, I thought, little or no dramatic effect.
Maybe in French these repetitions of phrases, words and images work in some mystical incantatory way, but not in English. In English they create not a hieratic, ritualistic atmosphere but a sense of boredom and wasted time. You want to shout, ‘Get on with it.’ Compare and contrast its clunky style with the fluency of The Picture of Dorian Gray which I’ve just read. Here’s the opening paragraph of the novel:
The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.
This is fluent and sensuous in a way most of the English version of Salome tries but fails to achieve.
You can see what Wilde’s trying to do by repeating certain images – the changing appearance of the moon, Salome’s tiny hands and feet the image of blood – to give them the archetypal power sought by the symbolists but, in my reading, it doesn’t work. It falls flat.
Only in some of the long speeches of Herod and Salome towards the end do you get a sense of the sensual force I think Wilde must have been looking for. Here’s Salome:
SALOME: Ah, Jokanaan, thou wert the man that I loved alone among men. All other men were hateful to me. But thou wert beautiful! Thy body was a column of ivory set upon feet of silver. It was a garden full of doves and lilies of silver. It was a tower of silver decked with shields of ivory. There was nothing in the world so white as thy body. There was nothing in the world so black as thy hair. In the whole world there was nothing so red as thy mouth. Thy voice was a censer that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee I heard a strange music.
Looking closely at this passage and pondering why it works where lots of the rest of the play doesn’t, I think it’s because it’s gentle. It is soft and shimmering, passive and sensuous. In this respect it is like the wonderful descriptions of treasures and trees and fireworks which illuminate the lovely fairy tales. But when Wilde tries to be more active, when he tries to convey menace and threat – in Jokanaan’s preaching or, even more, the speeches of lascivious Herod or furious Herodias – they don’t come off. They don’t, in my opinion, have real aggressive feeling behind them and so fall flat.
Maybe ‘Salome’ could be effectively staged but it would require a completely new translation, done by someone with a really good feeling for poetic prose, and probably a completely new adaptation which would modernise its themes of sex and violence for a more explicit age. It remains an anomaly and a problem.
Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations
It’s probably a well-worn observation that the Aubrey Beardsley illustrations commissioned for the first English edition are head and shoulders above to Douglas’s prose.
Illustration for Oscar Wilde’s Salome by Aubrey Beardsley (1894)
You can see them all, and read the full text, via the link below:
Books & Boots 