Salomé

Summary

Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé in French in 1891, and it remains one of the most shocking and beautiful plays in the English language. It tells the biblical story of how a princess demanded the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter, but Wilde transformed this brief gospel passage into something far more disturbing: a meditation on obsession, desire, and the terrible things people do when they cannot have what they want.

The play was banned in England. Sarah Bernhardt was in rehearsals to perform it when the censors shut it down. Wilde threatened, half-seriously, to renounce his British citizenship. But the scandal only made Salomé more famous. Richard Strauss turned it into an opera. Aubrey Beardsley created his most provocative illustrations for it. And audiences have been both fascinated and horrified by it for more than a century.

Let’s enter the palace of Herod.

The setting is a great terrace outside Herod’s banquet hall in Judaea. It is night. The moon hangs in the sky, and throughout the play, characters cannot stop looking at it, describing it in ways that reveal their deepest fears and desires.

A young Syrian captain leans over the balcony, gazing into the hall. He is looking at Princess Salomé. “How beautiful is the Princess Salomé tonight!” he says. His companion, the Page of Herodias, warns him: “You look at her too much. It is dangerous to look at people in such fashion. Something terrible may happen.”

This warning echoes throughout the play. Everyone is looking at someone. Herod looks at Salomé with barely concealed lust. Salomé will soon look at the prophet Jokanaan with something even more dangerous. The Page looks at the young Syrian with love he cannot express. And the moon looks down on all of them, cold and pale and judging.

Below the terrace, in a deep cistern, a prisoner waits. His name is Jokanaan, known to Christians as John the Baptist. He has been preaching in the wilderness, announcing the coming of a savior, and denouncing the sins of the royal family. Herod fears him but will not kill him. Herodias, Herod’s wife, wants him dead. She is the one Jokanaan condemns most fiercely, calling her a daughter of Babylon, a whore, a woman who has brought the wrath of God upon the land.

From the cistern, Jokanaan’s voice rises like thunder: “After me shall come another mightier than I. When he cometh, the solitary places shall be glad. The eyes of the blind shall see the day, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened.”

The soldiers laugh nervously. They don’t understand his prophecies. But someone is listening.

Princess Salomé emerges from the banquet hall. She is perhaps sixteen years old. She cannot stand to be inside any longer, she says. Her stepfather Herod keeps looking at her with his “mole’s eyes under his shaking eyelids.” She knows what that look means. She finds it disgusting.

On the terrace, she breathes the cool night air. She looks up at the moon and sees her own reflection: “The moon is cold and chaste. I am sure she is a virgin.” For Salomé, the moon is pure, untouched, aloof from the sordid world below.

Then she hears Jokanaan’s voice rising from the cistern. She is fascinated. Who is this man? Why does her stepfather fear him? She demands to see him.

The soldiers refuse. Herod has forbidden anyone to look upon the prophet. But Salomé turns to the young Syrian captain and uses a weapon more powerful than any command: she offers him her attention.

“You will do this thing for me, Narraboth,” she says, using his name for the first time. “Tomorrow when I pass in my litter beneath the gateway, I will let fall for you a little flower. It may be I will smile at you.”

The promise of a glance. The possibility of a smile. It is enough. The young captain disobeys his orders. He commands the prophet to be brought up from the cistern.

Jokanaan emerges. He is wild, wasted, terrible. His eyes are like “black holes burned by torches in a Tyrian tapestry.” His hair falls around him like clusters of black grapes. He does not look at Salomé. He looks through her.

He thunders his prophecies. He calls out against Herodias: “Where is she who gave herself unto the Captains of Assyria? Where is she who hath given herself to the young men of Egypt?” He is speaking of Salomé’s mother, and everyone knows it.

But Salomé does not care about the insults to her mother. She cares only about the man before her. “Jokanaan!” she cries. “I am amorous of thy body!”

What follows is one of the most extraordinary passages in dramatic literature. Salomé praises Jokanaan’s body, calling it white as lilies, white as the snows on the mountains of Judaea. She wants to touch it. Jokanaan recoils, calling her a daughter of Babylon. So Salomé changes her praise: his body is hideous, she says. Like a leper. Like a whitened sepulcher. No, it is his hair she loves. His hair is black as the cedars of Lebanon, black as the long nights when the moon hides her face. Let her touch his hair.

Again Jokanaan rejects her. So again she reverses herself: his hair is horrible, covered with mire and dust. What she truly desires is his mouth. His mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is redder than the feet of those who tread the wine in the wine-press. There is nothing in the world so red as his mouth.

“Let me kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan.”

The prophet is horrified. “Never! Daughter of Babylon! Daughter of Sodom!”

Salomé is not discouraged. “I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan.”

The young Syrian captain can bear no more. He has been watching the woman he loves throw herself at this wild prophet. His warnings go unheard. His devotion counts for nothing. He draws his sword and kills himself, falling between Salomé and Jokanaan.

Salomé does not even look at his body. “Let me kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan,” she says again.

The prophet curses her and retreats back into the cistern. But his last words linger in the air: “I do not wish to look at thee. Thou art accursed.”

Herod appears on the terrace, followed by Herodias and the entire court. He has come looking for Salomé. He slips in the blood of the dead captain and sees it as an evil omen. He hears a beating of wings in the air, though no one else does. He is terrified of something he cannot name.

But his fear cannot compete with his desire. He cannot stop looking at Salomé. “The moon has a strange look tonight,” he says. “She is like a mad woman seeking everywhere for lovers.”

Herodias snaps at him: “The moon is like the moon. That is all.” She knows what her husband really means.

Herod offers Salomé wine. She refuses. He offers her fruit. She refuses. He offers her a seat beside him. She refuses. She is waiting for something.

Meanwhile, Jokanaan’s voice continues to rise from the cistern, pronouncing doom: “The Lord hath come! The day of which I spoke!” Herodias cannot bear it. She wants the prophet dead. But Herod refuses. Jokanaan is a holy man. He has seen God. To kill him would bring disaster.

The tension builds. Herod, growing desperate to see Salomé smile, makes a fatal offer. “Dance for me, Salomé,” he begs. “If you dance for me you may ask of me what you will, and I will give it you, even unto the half of my kingdom.”

Herodias tells her daughter not to dance. But Salomé rises. “You have sworn it, Tetrarch?”

Herod swears by his life, by his crown, by his gods.

Salomé dances the dance of the seven veils.

When the dance is finished, Herod is delirious with pleasure. “What wouldst thou have?” he asks. “Speak.”

Salomé kneels before him. “I would that they presently bring me in a silver charger…”

Herod laughs. A silver charger! How charming. “What is it you would have in a silver charger?”

Salomé rises to her feet.

“The head of Jokanaan.”

Herod recoils. He offers Salomé everything else he possesses. His emerald that lets you see great distances. His white peacocks that walk in the garden, their beaks gilded with gold. His jewels: pearls like fifty moons caught in a golden net, amethysts black like wine, topazes yellow as the eyes of tigers, opals that burn with an ice-like flame. He will give her the mantle of the high priest. He will give her the veil of the sanctuary.

But Salomé repeats her demand with terrifying patience. “Give me the head of Jokanaan.”

Herodias is delighted. Finally, her enemy will die. She takes the ring of death from Herod’s hand and passes it to the executioner before the Tetrarch can stop her.

The executioner descends into the cistern. Salomé leans over and listens. “There is no sound. I hear nothing. Why does he not cry out, this man?” She urges the executioner on: “Strike! Strike, Naaman!”

Then a great black arm rises from the cistern, bearing on a silver shield the head of Jokanaan.

Salomé seizes the head and addresses it as a lover might address the beloved who scorned her. “Ah! Thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now.”

She speaks to his closed eyes, which no longer look at her with scorn. She speaks to his still tongue, which no longer denounces her. She tells him that she loved him, that she was a princess and he treated her as a harlot, but she loved him still. And she asks the question that haunts the entire play: “Wherefore didst thou not look at me, Jokanaan? If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me.”

Perhaps she is right. Perhaps she is mad. Perhaps there is no difference.

She kisses his mouth.

“There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? But perchance it is the taste of love. They say that love hath a bitter taste. But what of that? I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan. I have kissed thy mouth.”

A moonbeam falls on her, covering her with light.

Herod turns and sees her. “Kill that woman!” he commands.

The soldiers rush forward and crush Salomé beneath their shields.

Curtain.

Salomé disturbs audiences because it refuses to explain itself. Is Salomé a villain or a victim? Is she evil or simply so stifled by the corrupt world around her that her desire curdled into something monstrous? The play offers no answers.

What Wilde gives us instead is a portrait of desire in its most dangerous form. Everyone in this play wants something they cannot have. Herod wants Salomé. The young Syrian wants Salomé. Herodias wants the prophet silenced. And Salomé wants the one man who refuses to look at her, the one man whose rejection makes him irresistible.

The moon watches over all of it, taking on the character of whoever looks at it. To the Page of Herodias, it is a dead woman seeking dead things. To Herod, it is a mad woman searching for lovers. To Salomé, it is a virgin, pure and untouchable. The moon is a mirror, and what we see in it reveals who we are.

When Salomé finally gets what she wants, the taste is bitter. That is always the way with obsession. The wanting is everything. The having is nothing. She waited the whole play to kiss Jokanaan’s mouth, and the kiss brings only the taste of blood and the shadow of death.

Oscar Wilde was a master of wit and comedy, known for plays like The Importance of Being Earnest where nothing serious happens and everything sparkles with laughter. But in Salomé, he created something different: a tragedy where language becomes incantation, where desire becomes doom, and where a young princess becomes both destroyer and destroyed.

The play asks us to look at Salomé without flinching. To see her cruelty and her yearning, her manipulation and her desperation. To understand that she is a monster and a child, a victim of her world and the architect of its bloodiest night.

Like the moon, she is whatever we choose to see.

This has been Salomé by Oscar Wilde.