On Sarah Bernhardt’s Cancelled Production of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé

Abstract

In late June 1892, the Lord Chamberlain’s Examiner of Plays, Edward Smyth Pigott, declined to licence Sarah Bernhardt’s planned production in London of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. Details of how the play would have been staged are limited. This has led to much debate about how—or even if—the Dance of the Seven Veils, a centrepiece of the play, would have been performed. Conversely, assumptions about casting, though supported only by circumstantial evidence, have hardened into facts. Here I note previously overlooked sources that speak to both of these points. The descriptioné of the Dance of the Seven Veils in Wilde’s script is famously brief: ‘salomé danse la danse des sept voiles’.1 The freedom that Wilde gifted readers and, later, stage directors to imagine the dance for themselves also obscured whatever might have been his own vision. Wilde’s friend and literary executor Robert Ross left the only clue of any substance when he averred, five years after Wilde’s death, that the author had not wanted ‘anything in the nature of Loie Fuller’s performances’.2 Fuller had achieved prominence in Paris in the 1890s with her ‘serpentine dance’, in which she manoeuvred large veils using hand-held poles while illuminated by coloured lights; she devised Salomé choreographies in 1895 and 1907.3