САЛОМЕ: Трагедия в одном акте

A princess desires a prophet. The prophet refuses her. And the most scandalous, most beautiful, and most perfectly decadent one-act play in the English dramatic tradition begins its single inexorable movement toward catastrophe. Herod Antipas is giving a feast. His stepdaughter Salomé has left the banquet table and come out onto the terrace, where the night air is cooler and the moon hangs over the palace with the particular quality of a woman rising from her tomb. From a cistern in the terrace floor comes the voice of Jokanaan — John the Baptist — imprisoned below, prophesying in the darkness with the absolute conviction of a man who has nothing left to fear. Salomé demands that the soldier guarding the cistern bring the prophet up to her. When Jokanaan appears — filthy, magnificent, entirely indifferent to the power she represents — Salomé desires him with an intensity that the play renders without apology and without mitigation. Jokanaan refuses her, repudiates her, and returns to his cistern. Herod, whose own desire for his stepdaughter is the play's most uncomfortable undercurrent, begs Salomé to dance for him. She agrees — in exchange for whatever she asks. She asks for the head of Jokanaan on a silver charger. Oscar Wilde wrote Salomé in French in 1891 — at the height of his fame and two years before the catastrophe of his trials — as a deliberate act of aesthetic provocation, drawing on the Symbolist tradition of Mallarmé and Maeterlinck to create a work of compressed, incantatory, deliberately artificial theatrical beauty unlike anything in the English dramatic tradition. The Lord Chamberlain banned the play in England for its representation of Biblical figures on stage. Aubrey Beardsley illustrated the published edition with drawings of scandalous, incomparable beauty. Richard Strauss set it as an opera that remains one of the most powerful works in the twentieth-century operatic repertoire. The play itself — in the English translation supervised by Wilde himself — is a work of concentrated theatrical power and linguistic beauty that repays every reading. Salomé is essential reading for anyone interested in Oscar Wilde, the Aesthetic and Decadent movements, Symbolist drama, or the history of theatrical censorship and artistic freedom. This edition presents the complete, unabridged text of the play in the authorized English translation.