COVE

Oscar Wilde’s tragedy Salome was originally intended to debut at the Palace Theatre in London in 1892. The production had a promising start: Wilde had recently found success as a playwright with the production of his society comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan, in February of that year, and the internationally celebrated actress (and Wilde’s personal friend) Sarah Bernhardt had agreed to fill the leading role. However, the London Examiner of Plays censored the production before it premiered on the basis that it represented biblical figures in perverse and erotic contexts. The play would eventually be published in France in 1893, and translated to English with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in 1894.

That Salome’s debut production was shut down due to censorship is hardly surprising. Though by the fin-de-siècle Christianity’s dominance in Victorian England was weakening, the religion remained institutionally powerful. In addition, Wilde was a seminal figure in the late-Victorian Decadent movement that rejected moral evaluations of art, revelled in the taboo, the perverse, and the excess, and railed against the dominant culture through these themes. Salome is no exception: Wilde’s play, as a retelling of the biblical story of the execution of John the Baptist with perverse and erotic twists, was immediately crossing a cultural line. The Examiner of Plays described the production as “half-biblical, half-pornographic” for the lustful actions of several characters. The religiously motivated censoring of Salome demonstrates how Wilde’s play was rejected by the dominant culture and is reflective of its place in the larger Decadent movement of its time.

Oscar Wilde first published Salomé in French in 1893. The story of the play is loosely based on the biblical passage that tells of John the Baptist's beheading after the daughter of Herodias dances for Herod. In Wilde's version, it is Salome, not her mother, who demands John's head on a silver platter. The first English edition, Salome: A Tragedy in One Act,was published in 1894 by The Bodley Head and illustrated with 10 full-page pictures by Aubrey Beardsley. Both the text and its images were controversial. The publisher, John Lane, suppressed some of Beardsley's illustrations; these were later published in the 1907 edition. Oscar Wilde did not like Beardsley's illustrations. "My Herod is like the Herod of Gustave Moreau--wrapped in his jewels and sorrows. My Salomé is a mystic, the sister of Salammbô, a Sainte Thérèse who worships the moon; dear Aubrey's designs are like the naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes on the margins of his copybooks" (Jean-Paul Raymond and Charles Ricketts, Oscar Wilde: Recollections).

After a long two years, Oscar Wilde was released from prison in 1897 which left him impoverished and exiled resulting in the decision to move to Paris. The last few years of his life were not the best due to being poor and not having a place he could call home; he only wrote one work at the time. On November 30th 1900 Oscar Wilde passed away due to meningitis, which put an end to his life in just five days. Many speculated how Wilde contracted the disease with some saying it stemmed from syphilis while many others thought that was absurd as they believed the meningitis may have resulted due to a faulty surgery he underwent or an infection he had in his ear due to an injury he got in prison. Despite the constant speculation, the day of his death was a loss for many nonetheless. 

This edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salome: A Tragedy in One Act, features sixteen provocative illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. It was published by John Lane and the Bodley Head in London and New York in 1907. Beardsley’s illustrations are photomechanical line block reproductions in pen and ink in an Art Nouveau style. Illustrations are featured in full-page reproductions, adjacent to the text, and are characterized by black and white massed shapes. Beardsley’s illustrations provide a stylized, symbolic visual commentary to Wilde’s play. This edition succeeds Wilde’s original publication of Salome in 1894, which Wilde intended to have the play put on at the Palace Theatre in London. However, the play failed to debut as a result of the British Examiner of Plays’ censoring efforts due to the text featuring biblical characters and perverse notions of religion and sexuality. This scandal was furthermore compounded by Wilde’s 1895 public indecency trial, which significantly hindered not only Wilde’s career, but Beardsley’s as well because of the popular associations between them as a result of this text.

Source:

beta.1890s.ca/wilde_bio/

archive.org/details/salometrag…

www.victorianweb.org/gender/sa…