![]() ![]() The play was, in fact banned (no shocker there). At that time, English theater was regulated by the Lord Chamberlain, who had the job as censor. In 1893, two years after its writing, it was finally set to debut on the London stage starring the legendary French actress Sarah Bernhardt. This is a beautiful play about an ugly, ugly, ugly thing. ![]() Wilde originally wrote the play in French because "here was another instrument I had listened to all my life, and I wanted once to touch this new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it" (Ellmann 373). As in the Biblical versions of the story, which appear in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, Salomé dances for her creepy-as-anything stepfather, Herod, and requests the head of John the Baptist (called Jokanaan in the play, after the Hebrew pronunciation of his name) in return. Salomé, written in 1891 by Oscar Wilde, is a one-act play based on the Biblical story of the beheading of John the Baptist. Here's a Salomé in a nutshell, served up on a (gulp) silver platter: girl meets boy, girl has the hots for boy, boy rejects girl, girl dances for her sleazy stepdad, girl has stepdad behead boy, girl makes out with boy's severed head. ![]()
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