Salomé

Abstract Salomé is arguably the most controversial and intriguing of Wilde’s plays. Written in French in Paris in 1891–2 as a scandalous reinterpretation of a well-known biblical story, banned by the London Examiner of Plays, and published in book form shortly before Wilde’s spectacular downfall and imprisonment for ‘acts of gross indecency’, the play continues to invite both scholarly and creative readings of Salomé’s aesthetic and erotic transgression in tandem with Wilde’s own. To date, Wilde’s Salomé has generated an astonishing array of artistic adaptations across many genres and media, starting with Richard Strauss’s opera in 1905 and ranging from dance and music to film and popular culture. Over the decades, Wilde’s play has attracted hundreds of scholars across many disciplines as well, ranging from fin-de-siècle and modernist studies to queer studies and feminist studies. In recent years, the scholarly focus has shifted from the well-explored contexts of Wilde’s own lifetime to the post-Wildean intertextual history of Salomé’s twentieth- and twenty-first-century adaptations in a comparative and global context. This chapter aims to provide an accessible overview of the major trends in the critical and creative reception of Oscar Wilde’s play since the early twentieth century, and to explain some of the reasons why Salomé has remained such a fertile text for both artists and scholars.