Oscar Wilde’s personal copy of Salomé — gifted to his lover

‘There are only two tragedies,’ wrote Oscar Wilde — ‘one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.’ This aphorism takes on added significance in the context of episodes from Wilde’s own life: the indefinite banning of his play Salomé from the London stage in 1892, for example.

This was patently a case of the writer not getting what he wanted. He even briefly considered taking up French citizenship, so piqued was he by the Lord Chamberlain’s decision. Officially, Wilde was denied a licence for his play about the eponymous princess because no biblical figure could appear as a stage character.

As will be set out below, there was more at stake than that, however. The banning of Salomé foreshadowed Wilde’s better-known brush with the British authorities in 1895, when he was found guilty of ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.

Some 600 copies of the Salomé playtext were published in its first edition. One of these — Wilde’s personal copy — is being offered in Livres rares et Manuscrits at Christie’s in Paris (live for bidding until 5 November 2025). It features original ink drawings by Wilde’s friends Max Beerbohm and Charles Ricketts, as well as a signed inscription from the playwright to Robert Ross, the lover to whom he gave the book as a present.

Through the 1880s, Wilde held celebrity status on both sides of the Atlantic. He was less famous for his literary output, though, than for his larger-than-life persona as a dandyish aesthete with a ready supply of bons mots.

This changed in the first half of the next decade, when he experienced a creative purple patch, writing several works which are today regarded as classics. These included his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), plus the plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

Standing ovations became the norm after performances of these plays, thanks to their wit and repartee. This contrasted starkly, however, with the stern critical reception for Wilde’s novel — which offers an insight into late Victorian social conservatism. The Picture of Dorian Gray tells of a young man who sells his soul in return for eternal beauty and youth. The reviewer in the Daily Chronicle called it ‘a poisonous book… heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction’.

It was against this backdrop that Wilde penned Salomé. The princess’s story, which derives from the gospels of Matthew and Mark, reached peak popularity in the late 19th century — particularly in France, where it inspired, among other works, Gustave Flaubert’s 1877 novella Hérodias, Jules Massenet’s 1881 opera Hérodiade and a pair of paintings by Gustave Moreau, Salomé Dancing before Herod and The Apparition.

A keen Francophile, Wilde was aware of this trend, and it goes some way to explaining why, early in 1892, he completed his own adaptation of the story — in French. (Salomé is his sole literary work not written in English.)

Wilde described the French language as an ‘instrument… I wanted once to touch… to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it’.

Salomé so captivates her stepfather, King Herod, that he promises to grant her any wish if she performs an erotic dance for him. She requests the severed head of John the Baptist, brought to her on a silver platter — a wish that is duly granted after she does her dance.

In the gospels, the narrative has certain gaps, including one striking example which Wilde filled in very differently from Flaubert and Massenet. They made Salomé’s mother, Herodias, the key character, vengefully instigating as she does the princess’s call for John’s head. Her spur is the preacher’s condemnation of her divorce from Salomé’s father to marry Herod.

Wilde, by contrast, puts the princess centre stage, interpreting her motivation as lust for John the Baptist, which turns to hatred after he rejects her. Salomé performs a notorious ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ for the king (a Wildean invention, entailing the sensual removal of seven successive veils). She ends up singing to John’s severed head and kissing it passionately on the lips.

The feted French actress — and artist — Sarah Bernhardt agreed to take on the title role. She would be in London from May 1892 onwards anyway, to star in a season of French-language dramas, and her plan was to play Salomé after that ended.

Rehearsals took place, only for the Lord Chamberlain to intervene. He was Britain’s theatrical gatekeeper, who had to approve new plays before they were staged, and he was advised by his Examiner of Plays, who read the script of Salomé and observed: ‘The piece is written in French — half Biblical, half pornographic — by Oscar Wilde himself. Imagine the average British public’s reception of it.’

There was a fear that Salomé would become a succès de scandale to surpass The Picture of Dorian Gray, and a licence was denied.

Wilde turned his hopes to staging the play in Paris instead, though he was soon so busy with other works that this slipped down his list of priorities.

The first edition of the playtext was published in Paris and London simultaneously in 1893. In Wilde’s personal copy, he let Beerbohm — one of the day’s leading caricaturists — produce several ink drawings in his typically insouciant style, five of them depicting the playwright himself.

On one page, Wilde plays the harp; on another, he flies masked through the air with a huge quill on his back. He appears with the same quill on the dedication page (Salomé is dedicated to Wilde’s friend, the Paris-based poet Pierre Louÿs, who helped him with finer points of the French language).

On the final page of text, Wilde levitates besides the word fin. Then, on an originally blank double-page spread at the back of the book, he is seen writing in his dressing gown at home, surrounded by various curious figures.

Two further drawings are worth dwelling on, addressing as they do the censorship of Salomé. One, by Beerbohm, shows a trio of figures — a literary critic, a member of the public and a member of ‘the authorities’ — each perched on a mound, expressing their disapproval of the play.

The other drawing — the sole contribution by illustrator Charles Ricketts — shows Beerbohm repeatedly writing his name on the base of a huge statue of a dejected-looking Wilde. The dejection, one assumes, is due to Salomé’s fate.

Wilde’s copy of the playtext also contains a loose sheet of paper, folded and inserted inside. On it is a sonnet about Salomé, which was handwritten for him by Louÿs.

Perhaps most notable of all, though, is Wilde’s autograph note to Robert Ross opposite the title page. It reads: ‘This book — this wonderful book — was decorated for me by Max Beerbohm: and by me given to Robert Ross. Oscar Wilde. Paris.’

It’s thought that Ross was Wilde’s first male lover, the pair having met around 1886, when the writer was still married to Constance Lloyd, the mother of his two sons. The length and nature of his romantic connection with Ross isn’t clear, as Wilde was involved in a higher-profile relationship by the early 1890s — with Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas. (As is well known, it was a clash with Bosie’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, that precipitated Wilde’s imprisonment.)

What seems clear is that Wilde and Ross remained close throughout, and the writer entrusted Ross with the responsibility of being his literary executor after his death. (Following Ross’s own passing, his ashes were placed inside Wilde’s tomb at Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.)

The book coming to auction, then, offers unique testimony to a significant moment in Wilde’s career, while also connecting assorted cultural luminaries from both sides of the English Channel.

Salomé received its premiere in a production by the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre company at the Comédie-Parisienne in 1896. Reviews were positive, with the lead actress Lina Munte singled out for particular praise: the newspaper Le Matin described her as ‘absolutely remarkable, with ferocious sensuality’.

Wilde was incarcerated in Reading Gaol at the time — and, indeed, never got to see his play performed. He died in 1900, aged 46, five years before the first British staging of Salomé, in a discreet private performance in London. It wasn’t until 1931 that the official ban on the play was lifted.

Livres rares et Manuscrits is live for bidding until 5 November 2025, and on view from 31 October to 4 November at Christie’s in Paris