Why Oscar Wilde’s Play About a Biblical Temptress Was Banned From the British Stage for Decades

In late 1891, the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde turned to the Bible as a source of inspiration, revisiting the story of a biblical figure who had long fascinated him: Salome, the teenage co-conspirator of the New Testament who requests the head of St. John the Baptist on a platter as a reward for her sensual dance. Wilde had long been a fan of Gustave Flaubert’s 1877 short story about Salome’s mother, Queen Herodias, and he decided it was his turn to give the enticing tale a go.

The author of such seminal works as The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde catapulted to fame by making a mockery of shallow British high society. But he would soon discover that even the most cultured audiences in Great Britain were more willing to witness themselves made into a silly farce on stage than to consider daring new takes on time-honored religious stories. The writer would have a much harder time getting his production of Salome onto the British stage than anticipated.

“Censors were, unsurprisingly, alarmed by the not merely sexual but sexually transgressive—incest and necrophilia—aspects of the play,” wrote art historian Simon Wilson in a 2017 journal article. “[They] might also have been alarmed by the presentation of Salome as a powerful woman who bargains on equal terms, not merely with a man, but with a king.”

Published in French in 1893 and translated into English the following year, Salome is a one-act tragic play that arguably expands the horizons of its main character more than any other cultural adaptation. In the Bible and in Flaubert’s version of the story, it is Herodias who calls for John’s death. Angry that the preacher criticized her marriage to her brother-in-law, King Herod, as an unclean, incestuous union, the queen manipulates her naive daughter into asking for his execution. “His head was brought in on a platter and given to the girl, who carried it to her mother,” the Book of Matthew states.

While Flaubert portrays Salome as an innocent pawn in her mother’s ravenous hunger for revenge against John, Wilde depicts Salome’s actions as entirely self-directed and voluntary. In his version of events, Salome doesn’t care that John (renamed Jokanaan the Prophet) slandered her mother. What bothers Salome is that Jokanaan denied her ardent romantic advances and bruised her precious ego.

“Daughter of Sodom, come not near me!” Jokanaan tells Salome in the play. “But cover thy face with a veil, and scatter ashes upon thine head, and get thee to the desert and seek out the Son of Man.” In response, Salome repeatedly asks him to kiss her. Like the majority of the Victorian British public, Jokanaan is intimidated by Salome’s shameless sexuality and wants nothing to do with her. Dangerously selfish, vain and proud, Wilde’s Salome is anything but innocent. The playwright’s vision is of a Salome who is fearsome, not fearful.

Hellbent on destroying the pure, chaste and overly self-righteous preacher who denied her satisfaction, Salome performs a seductive dance at her stepfather Herod’s birthday feast. When Herod, a weak-willed king who desires his stepdaughter carnally, offers Salome a generous present to thank her for her dance, she without hesitation demands Jokanaan’s head offered to her on a silver platter. She would rather have her beloved dead than alive. As a decapitated head, Jokanaan can no longer escape her “love.”

“Thou wouldst have none of me, Jokanaan,” Salome says to the dead preacher. “Thou didst reject me. Thou didst speak evil words against me. Thou didst treat me as a harlot, as a wanton. … Well, Jokanaan, I still live, but thou, thou art dead, and thy head belongs to me. I can do with it what I will.”

At a dinner in the spring of 1892, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt reportedly asked Wilde, “Why don’t you write me a play?” He replied, “I have already done so.” After reading Salome, Bernhardt expressed enthusiastic interest in taking on the leading role, and rehearsals soon began in London.

The planned staging of Salome at the Palace Theater would have been a historic performance, as Bernhardt was the A-lister of her time and no doubt would have flourished in the part. But straightlaced Victorian Britain got too nervous about the impending premiere after details of the play got leaked to the press.

At the time, the Lord Chamberlain, the most senior officer in the Royal Household of the United Kingdom, acted as a theatrical gatekeeper, approving all new plays before they were staged. The government official, advised by Examiner of Plays Edward Pigott, denied Salome this approval, deeming it too inappropriate and immoral for the public. “The piece is written in French—half biblical, half pornographic—by Oscar Wilde himself,” Pigott wrote to a colleague. “Imagine the average British public’s reception of it.”

Officially, the play was blocked on the grounds that it was a biblical story. “No biblical personage, and certainly not God or Jesus Christ, could appear as a stage character, however reverent the production,” wrote British Library curator Kathryn Johnson in 2016. The protests surrounding Salome’s censorship, however, were far more complicated than that.

The stuffy 19th-century British public was frankly terrified of the prospect of a teenage girl whose lust for a man quickly morphed into bloodlust in just one act. Besides challenging the sacred canon of the Bible, Wilde’s play presented something the time period wasn’t fully prepared for: a violent young woman who gets exactly what she wants.

And then there is the infamous dance. Salome takes her crush’s “advice” and dons a veil—seven of them, in fact, which she proceeds to discard one by one for her stepfather’s pleasure. The script’s direction is notably vague, simply stating, “Salome dances the dance of the seven veils.” But choreographers of the past and present haven’t shied away from the many salacious possibilities offered by this guidance. In Victorian times, such a striptease was considered a scandal. Women of the time period tended to dress in layers, but those layers were meant to stay on.

Salome was, in every possible way, a no-go. Wilde was outraged by the Lord Chamberlain’s denial of his and other English playwrights’ right to free creative expression. The literary Irishman was ready to stage his own one-man protest against censorship. “Aware that there was a ban on plays depicting biblical characters, Wilde should not have been so outraged that artists and sculptors could portray biblical figures while a playwright could not,” wrote biographer Barbara Belford in Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius. Nonetheless, Belford added, “he threatened to leave the country and settle in France.”

Wilde would never get to watch his play performed in full. Though it was published in English in 1894 alongside strikingly provocative illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, Salome was only staged in Paris in 1896. By then, Wilde was in prison, serving two years for “gross indecency” for his relationships with other men. The Théâtre de l’Oeuvre company did justice to Wilde’s vision, and the honor of playing Wilde’s Salome for the first time ever went to French actress Lina Munte. She got rave reviews from appreciative French audiences, who—unlike the English—liked to see uninhibited passion played out on stage. The newspaper Le Matin praised Munte as “absolutely remarkable with her ferocious sensuality.”

Like Salome, Wilde would eventually find a home abroad. After his release from prison in 1897, he moved to France, where he spent the final three years of his life impoverished and in exile. He died in Paris in November 1900 at age 46.

Bohemian Paris had won a victory over stodgy London, which first dared to stage a private performance of Salome in May 1905. This was done, very cautiously, by the New Stage Club. Millicent Murby was the first British actress to play Salome. Unlike Bernhardt or Munte, she wasn’t a professionally trained performer. Her day job was that of a postal clerk. Established companies in Britain with their own theaters were forbidden from even considering the play, so only amateurs could get away with it. Secretive, underground performances of Salome open only to select audiences continued to take place in Britain until the ban was officially lifted in 1931.

Creatives have never stopped performing Salome, unsanitized and on their own terms. Nudity, sexual desire, mental illness and staunch political commentary have all made their way into the most recent batch of tributes. The 1988 British film Salome’s Last Dance, directed by Ken Russell, is aggressively, unabashedly erotic and interweaves Wilde’s real-life sexual exploits with a staging of his notorious play. The unusual 2011 docudrama Wilde Salomé, which chronicles Al Pacino’s obsession with the Wilde play, stars Pacino as Herod, Jessica Chastain as Salome and Kevin Anderson as John the Baptist.

In 2023, Canadian director Atom Egoyan released Seven Veils, an experimental film about an opera based on a play. Amanda Seyfried plays Jeanine, a theater director with mental health issues who fights to cope with the stress of putting together a production of Salome, a Richard Strauss opera featuring a German translation of Wilde’s play as its libretto. Jeanine’s arc directly parallels Salome’s inability to handle her own extreme emotions. The film arrives in theaters in the United States on March 7.

SEVEN VEILS Trailer (2025, US Trailer) | In theaters nationwide March 7th!

“The story of Salome has such a rich inheritance,” Egoyan tells Deadline. “It comes to us from the Bible and then became the basis of this extraordinary play that Oscar Wilde wrote that explodes with language of people describing things they can’t have.”

More than a century after Wilde first wrote Salome, the play maintains a powerful hold on the international cultural psyche. Its themes of fatal abuses of power and unhinged, unrequited love will never stop being relevant or fascinating. No matter what era it is, Salome will dance her dance, demand a head on a platter and claim it as her own.