Approval was withheld because of a rule prohibiting the depiction of biblical characters on stage. The play went into rehearsals in June, but at that time all plays presented in Britain had to be approved by the official censor, the Lord Chamberlain. He submitted the play to the leading French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who accepted it for production in her 1892 season at the Royal English Opera House, in London. Punch's view of Wilde as a poilu, when he threatened to take French citizenship over the ban on Salome in Britain Of course, there are modes of expression that a Frenchman of letters would not have used, but they give a certain relief or colour to the play. The play was written in Paris some six months ago, where I read it to some young poets, who admired it immensely. There was another instrument to which I had listened all my life, and I wanted once to touch this new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it. I have one instrument that I know I can command, and that is the English language. Wilde wrote the play while staying in Paris and explained to an interviewer the following year why he had written it in French: The biographer Peter Raby comments that Wilde's interest had been further stimulated by descriptions of Gustave Moreau's paintings of Salome in Joris-Karl Huysmans's À rebours and by Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll, Jules Laforgue's "Salomé" in Moralités Légendaires and Stéphane Mallarmé's Hérodiade. He had been considering the subject of Salome since his undergraduate days at Oxford when Walter Pater introduced him to Flaubert's story Hérodias in 1877. Lady Windermere's Fan was completed but not yet staged, and his other West End successes, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were yet to come. When Wilde began writing Salome in late 1891 he was known as an author and critic, but was not yet established as a playwright. Film and other adaptations have been made of the play. The play became popular in Germany, and Wilde's text was taken by the composer Richard Strauss as the basis of his 1905 opera Salome, the international success of which has tended to overshadow Wilde's original play. Because the play depicted biblical characters it was banned in Britain and was not performed publicly there until 1931.
The first production was in Paris in 1896.
The play depicts the attempted seduction of Jokanaan ( John the Baptist) by Salome, step-daughter of Herod Antipas her dance of the seven veils the execution of Jokanaan at Salome's instigation and her death on Herod's orders.
The original 1891 version of the play was in French an English translation was published three years later. Salome (French: Salomé, pronounced ) is a one-act tragedy by Oscar Wilde. Illustration by Aubrey Beardsley for the first English edition of the play (1894)
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