Salomé A Tragedy in One Act: By Oscar Wilde

Salomé A Tragedy in One Act By Oscar WildeSalome (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 stepfathers 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.Herod Antipas Tetrarch of JudeaJokanaan the ProphetThe young Syrian Captain of the guardTigellinus a young RomanA CappadocianA NubianFirst soldierSecond soldierThe page of HerodiasJews Nazarenes etc.A slaveNaaman the ExecutionerHerodias Wife of the TetrarchSalomé daughter of HerodiasThe slaves of SaloméRehearsals for the plays debut on the London stage for inclusion in Sarah Bernhardts London season began in 1892 but were halted when the Lord Chamberlains 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 February 1893 and an English translation with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in February 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 latters 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 Wildes 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 was eventually premiered on 11 February 1896 while Wilde was in prison in Paris at the Comédie-Parisienne (at the Théâtre de lOEuvre in some accounts) in a staging by Lugné-Poes theatre group the Théâtre de lOEuvre. In Pall Mall Gazette of 29 June 1892 Wilde explained why he had written Salomé in French: I have one instrument that I know I can command and that is the English language. There was another instrument to which I had listened all my life and I wanted once to touch this new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it.