Having gotten Herod to agree to give her whatever she asks, she performs her dance. Because his rejection thwarts Salomé’s desire to touch Jokanaan and to kiss him on the mouth, she plots to kill him by fulfilling the lecherous Herod’s request for a dance-the infamous “Dance of the Seven Veils”-which exists only as a brief stage direction. The Salomé of Wilde’s play is cold and virginal, but with an unaccountable lust for the ascetic prophet Jokanaan (John the Baptist), who rebuffs her as the “daughter of Babylon, daughter of Sodom,” because of the adulterous marriage of her mother, Herodias, and her stepfather, Herod. Although an English translation, with the famous black-and-white illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, came out in 1894, it was not until 1896 that the play was performed, in its original French, in Paris. Because, since the time of Elizabeth I, the Lord Chamberlain refused to license plays containing biblical characters, the play was not produced in England. The modern history of the character known as Salomé, together with her dance, really begins in 1891, when Oscar Wilde wrote a drama in French called Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act, the title role allegedly intended for Sarah Bernhardt.
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