Customer Reviews

Salome

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
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This affordably-priced edition of Salome contains all the Aubrey Beardsley drawings and is the English translation undertaken by Lord Alfred Douglas of Wilde's most brilliant tale of passion, which was originally written in French to avoid (unsuccessfully) Victorian censorship. Salome is a simple tale of complex passion. Wilde's heroine bears no resemblance to her biblical origin. His Salome is no mere instrument of Herodias, but a dangerous and passionate young woman whose thwarted affections for John the Baptist lead to a disasterous climax for all persons involved. Wilde's script is a brilliant look at deep-rooted desires and the dangers of obsession. This edition of the play is a must for anyone building their own theatrical library.

I found this book to a very quick and interesting read. Salome is both loved and feared by men. She uses her deadly seductive power to get anything she wants, almost.
The price of the book is so cheap how can you resist not buying it.

Oscar Wilde touches here a fundamental subject in Christian lore : Salome and John the Baptist, and through them Jesus and the prophesy that he is the Messiah. It would be a perfect subject for an opera because the events are contained in too short a time and the feelings and motivations are too simple and intensely concentrated for a dramaruc play. Salome asks for John's head out of spite because she could not possess him, because he refused to acknowledge her, and also because she knows this will mean the downfall of her step-father, the killer of her own father, and the incestuous husband of her mother. So vengeance is her second motivation. Those motivations are too simple to build up the tragical force of a play, but they are so intense that they could have inspired the most dramatic and powerful music. Oscar Wilde's language is beautiful in many ways but this beauty does not give any complexity to the simpleness of the emotions and motivations. This beautiful language could have become the carrier of a beautiful music. Actually we can hear the music of a Scarlatti, or of a Purcell behind the words, maybe even a Haendel. But as a play it is a little bit flat and without enough depth to build a beautiful performance. As a matter of fact the centrepiece of the play, the dance of the seven veils, is not a dramatic event but a visual and musical event. And we cannot in anyway escape the recollection of the fantastic little black and white film by Clive Barker on the subject. Salome is worth more than just a dramatic play. She can only find her full strength when music and dancing come into the picture, when it is fully visual and musical.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Perpignan

This play is based on the biblical story of the death of John the Baptist. Herod Antipas, Tetrarch of Judea, is married to his brother's wife Herodias, but finds himself lusting after her daughter Salome. Overcome with wine and passion for Salome, he offers her anything to dance the dance of seven veils for him. Little does he know what price she will exact.

Oscar Wilde first published this book in Paris in 1891 in an attempt to bypass Victorian censorship. In 1894 it was translated into English, and published with a series of illustrations created by the incomparable Aubrey Beardsley. This book was quite shocking to Victorian Britain.

This book surprised me with its power. While not erotic in the modern, XXX sense, it is a compelling tale of decadence. The characters give no thought to anything but their own pleasure, and the worst of them all is the young (and far from innocent) Salome. Beardsley's stark, black-and-white pictures add to the tale, complementing Wilde's text with a disturbing, passionless sexuality. This is a fascinating story, and one that I recommend to any adult.

Oscar wild was a great author and I think all his writtings are excellent. I have really enjoyed reading many of his books and now this book originally wrote for the theater brings a great story with something which I think was not usual in Oscar wilde's stories. So if you want to get a great book and go further from a writer's words, Oscar wilde is a great option to enjoy and Analyze, I do.

Decadent, sexual, Byzantine, and finely-made.

This is a Salome of palpable quality. Bound in black cloth with a blind-stamped image of Salome surrounded by stars above John the Baptist's head. With matching slipcase.

Every page of text is laid out with golden-yellow and salmon rules surrounded by Persian arabesques. There are numerous incidental Valenti Angelo illustrations in black and white. His full page illustrations in black, white, blue, and salmon with real gilt.

And, incredibly, the gilt on the full-page illustrations is hand-applied.

The soft-copy volume had the original beautiful Beardsley prints along with the Lord Alfred translation from the french. My only criticism is that the type is rather small, but then again I'm getting older!
All in all, wonderful addition to any home library.

This is but a wee note to these really excellent (if at times misinformed) reviews, that there is an MP3 download version of the play performed, 48 minutes in length -- and it may be purchased here for only 99 pennies! The performers include Jack Evans, Forrest Williams, and Bettye Ackerman. It sounds rather dated and is very abridged, but it's interesting nonetheless.

Originally written in French, when Oscar Wilde was in exile in Paris, after his time in prison for having had an affair with young Alfred Douglas, alias Bosie, the future Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas (poet, author, critic and correspondent, 1870-1945), then translated by Lord Alfred Douglas, a translation that is in some editions attributed to Oscar Wilde himself. In spite of his perfect bilingualism, Oscar Wilde let a few English mistakes slip into his French text but that is minor and even attractively exotic. It is difficult to really say if the English version is Wilde's or Lord Alfred Douglas's. But the first thing we can say about this play is that the theme itself is symbolical of Oscar Wilde and his time. Oscar Wilde somewhere is John the Baptist and that metaphor is easy. We will try to go a lot farther in a while. But it is also typical of the time, the very beginning of the 20th century. A time when all the princes and princesses, queens and kings, lords and barons, bankers and industrialists were dancing on a floor thickly littered with bank notes. But a time too when people were dying in the bush in South Africa, or all kinds of natives were suffering under the whip of colonialism. It was a time of hypocrisy in which those who wanted to be truthful to themselves, their beliefs, and at times their gods, be they God himself, or herself, the working class or artistic creation, were running against the thick wall of absolute lack of understanding, of mediocrity and bigotry. It was the time when exploitation was an understatement for what was happening in the mines or the factories of the industrialized countries. It was the time when all kinds of fundamentalist ethics were imposed on the world: hemp was banned from our fields because of the competition its leaves represented to tobacco and the empire that was behind. Absinth was banned for no reason at all, except that it was a heavy competition against wine or other alcoholic beverages that represented big industrial and financial interests. All kinds of sexual abnormality was condemned and persecuted in Great Britain, though France was slightly more liberal. This society was qualified as Victorian, though it was reviving the deep roots of puritan England, the heritage of the old Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell. Puritanism was one of the fundamental characteristic of this time, with tantalizers and teetotalers and other torturous and tortuous social devices. It was the time of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the time of Dorian Gray in Wilde's own imagination. It was a time when well behaved people did not call a spade a spade, did not even call a spade anything at all because well behaved people had no commerce with that thing and had no word for that thing. It was the time of what was to be illustrated later as Lady Chatterley's lover or Maurice, or so many other intrigues and affairs crossing social classes, the acme of criminal activity in Great Britain at the time. And it is that drama Oscar Wilde lives in Salome. The fact that her society rejects the seer, the prophet, the announcer of the future, the liberator, and at the same time does not have the courage to execute him. And in this society she is the daughter of the Queen and step daughter and niece of the present King who imprisoned and put to death his brother, her father, the former king, and remarried his sister in law, Salome's mother, and by being all that, in two words a female Hamlet, she represents the upheaval which will bring the end of that rotten society. She falls in love with the imprisoned prophet, not because he is a lovable man in any way, not because she feels any sentimental attachment to him, but just because she is fascinated by the negation of her society he carries in himself, in his eyes and his body and his voice in a first ternary grouping of vision, doom and apocalypse, and then with his body and his hair and his mouth in a second grouping of sensual flesh, snakes and kissable lips, rebuilding like that the number of Solomon beyond the Christian trinity, the Jew beyond the Christian saint, the flesh of carnal life beyond the vision of the de-carnalized Christian trinity. And Oscar Wilde pushes this very metaphor to the extreme of transforming Salome from a sensual, sensitive and possessive lover into a vengeful, inflexible and purely animal executioner. Since John did not want to kiss her, she will have his head delivered to her on a silver platter just for the pleasure of kissing it, and, to her dismay, finding out that there is no pleasure in kissing a dead mouth and a dead tongue. The dance of the seven veils she paid for that head, that kiss, was of no avail since it did not deliver the sensual pleasure she was expecting in her foolish blindness. And the step father will have her slain by a plain soldier, like an unimportant piece of trash that has to be discarded and disposed of now she has brought the end of this world into being. How could Oscar Wilde be more visionary and see better the catastrophe of the big war, and all that will follow, being brought up in the future by the soul-less enjoyment of material goods and pleasures, wines and dances that are felling not only the tree that could hide the forest, but the forest itself that could have been hidden by the tree of a prophet, since a voice is only prophetic when you bring it to a dead end, the dead end of its own sacrifice, execution, martyrdom.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

At this inexpensive price this much sought for and cherished book deserves a space on your trophy-book shelf. Beautifully printed and preserved inside a black embossed box with doubled pages preventing bleed-through of the wonderful images and printing.

UNfortunately we may only appreciate this play truly in the original French WIlde wrote for Sarah Bernhardt: NOT FOR THE LATER ENGLISH TRANSLATOR who killed it - often we hear it was written for HIM, but it was written for Sarah as part of Wilde's ungoing campaign to reveal the hypocrisy, corruption callous violence and immorality of the BRitish self-proclaimed aristocracy.

Wilde as playwright was revolutionary and exposed the profound disease of the BRitish imperialists who had destroyed and sucked dry his nation of birth Ireland, where his parents were nationailists. Study this closely in the original, not in the stilted English translation by one of his stooges in that aristocracy. Or study my own excellent and living translation.

Unfortunately Berkoff's recorded staging of this play must ultimately disappoint.

And BEardsley never actually even read the play he was illustrating, yet the illustrations are his best known work today. UNfortunately (or otherwise) this present edition does not include the highly elaborate art-deco illustrations, so sinister and callous, by BEardsley, but a more simple and "naif" art-deco style by an Italian illustrator Valenti (please see my image for more careful adscription and sample illustrations of those presentable in public)

This edition is a great jewel in any case and one to acquire.

You are free to view mine if you wish. You will find it on my trophy bookshelf next to Coleridge, Dante and Homer. (I keep James Joyce in the bedroom)