Wilde’s Salomé was staged for the first time in England on the 10th and 13th May 1905,1 and for a second time on 10th and 18th June in the following year. The first performance of Salomé was given by the New Stage Club at the Bijou Theatre in Archer Street, Westbourne Grove and the second was produced by the Literary Theatre Society at the King’s Hall, Covent Garden, London in 1906.2 Yeats attended both the 1905 and 1906 productions of Salomé and the effect the play produced on him was profound. Immediately following the 1905 performance Yeats began to revise three of his finished plays: The Shadowy Waters , On Baile’s Strand and Deirdre . The re-written versions of each of these plays exhibit elements and concepts derived from Wilde’s Salomé and this is especially noticeable in the play, Deirdre , which Yeats revised in 1906 and which benefited from his seeing both performances of Salomé. Yeats’s experience of seeing Salomé in performance was heightened by his keen interest in symbolist theatre and by Salomé being a symbolist play in the English language. The impact that Salomé made on Yeats’s creative imagination is clearly reflected in his work.
Symbolist Theatre and Wilde’s Salomé
The Symbolist Movement originated in France and while it had affiliations with its immediate predecessor, Decadence, it was considered a more serious literary phenomenon than that movement which, although still in evidence during the 1890s, was in decline. Decadence had promoted self-absorption and a cult for the artificial; inclining towards moral perversity, it sought to find new sensations through the juxtaposition of the unexpected. Decadence had inculcated in art and literature an air of fatigue and restlessness, which Wilde satirized in his essay, “The Decay of Lying” (1889), intimating its demise in “The Tired Hedonists” club.3 However, Decadence had captivated him as it had many young writers of the period, and like them, he too was entranced by the literary persona of Des Esseintes, the protagonist of Huysmans’s seminal novel, Á Rebours, who delighted in the artificial and experienced the pleasures of the spirit and of the senses.4 It was Arthur Symons who remarked that the book “expressed not merely [the author] but an epoch”.5
While retaining resonances of Decadence, Symbolism was, as Wilde put it, “a new and fascinating disease”.6 The Symbolists reacted against a materialist culture that was as evident in the nineteenth century theatres of Paris as it was in those of London. The movement questioned the notions of truth and reality put forward by the earlier nineteenth century Naturalist movement in European literature and art.7 Symbolists aspired to an apprehension of a knowledge beyond the everyday concerns of ordinary life, and aimed to show the ineffable through images. They evoked a sense of mystery, of an otherly dimension, by setting finite images side by side with concepts of the infinite. Arthur Symons defined Symbolism as the expression of “the unseen by the visible”.8 Essentially, the symbolist art was Gnostic and the sense of mysticism is strong in most Symbolist works. Ellmann offers a more secular, though basically similar formulation of it in adapting the words of J. Isaacs , “symbolism is an attempt through a subtly articulated pattern of metaphors to offer hidden aspects of consciousness or experience”.9 In his dynamic essay on Wilde’s simultaneously dandiacal and symbolist approach to Salomé, Joseph Donohue asserts the symbolist’s “radical impulse to identify and reify the underlying unities of the world”.10
The Symbolist art involved the integration of all its constituent elements—movement, colour, lighting, costume, language, music. The Symbolist playwrights were somewhat indebted to the idea of total theatre evolved by musician, composer and playwright, Richard Wagner (1813–1883), which proposed a form of theatre in which all the arts are unified. Wagner , however, privileged music above poetry, stating that “the union of music and poetry must always end in subordination of the latter”11—this was a tenet that was not acceptable to most symbolist writers. The Symbolists were concerned with the correspondence of phenomena and sought to emphasize this philosophical perception in the convergence of all things. In a symbolist play the scenic elements and the language itself were interrelated and used as symbolic representations. For example, the landscape of the Belgian symbolist, Maurice Maeterlinck’s Salomé style play, La Princesse Maleine, interacts with the action on stage while changes in colour and sound accompany the characters’ actions. Wilde employs this scenic technique in Salomé, having the changing colours of the moon coincide with related happenings on stage.
The Symbolist method of dramatization is characterized by a deep sense of ritual; everything is deliberately performed to lead up to a cumulative, unified effect and the exposition of one overriding emotion. Movement is often artificially contrived, as in the puppet-like actions of Maeterlinck’s characters, and words and their enunciation are patterned on music, their delivery demanding a certain vocal virtuosity on the part of the performer. Colour has its symbolic significance and is also used in costume, scenery and lighting to consolidate the sense of overall unity. Oscar Wilde discussed with Charles Ricketts the idea of using blocks of colour in Salomé to accentuate the groupings of actors and enhance the visual unity of the play. He intended that “the Jews should be in yellow, the Romans were to be in purple, the soldiery in bronze green, and John in white.”12 Recurring symbols, similar in their use to the leitmotivs employed by Wagner in his operas, featured in Symbolist drama and acted as one of the unifying factors in the interwoven fabric of total theatre. Maeterlinck used the repetition of small words to induce a trance-like effect and Wilde employed this Maeterlinckian method in Salomé. Wilde was particularly impressed by the Belgian playwright who succeeded more than any other writer of that time in portraying on stage the aspirations of symbolism—the musical qualities and mystical elements. The critic, Peter Raby, suggests that Maeterlinck “offered Wilde a theatrical vocabulary more complete and more innovative than anything the London stage could demonstrate”.13
Wilde recalls beginning his writing of Salomé one evening in Paris during the winter months of 1891, having returned to his lodgings in the Rue des Cappucines from dinner with friends to whom he had been relating the Biblical story of Salomé. Finding a blank notebook lying on his table he began to write. Some hours later he left his writing and went up the street to the Grand Café where he told the leader of the café orchestra, “I am writing a play about a woman dancing with her bare feet in the blood of a man she has craved for and slain. I want you to play something in harmony with my thoughts.” Wilde was satisfied with the response of the orchestra leader and later told Vincent O’Sullivan, “Rigo played such wild and terrible music that those who were there stopped talking and looked at each other with blanched faces. Then I went back and finished Salomé.” However accurate Wilde’s story may be, he ...