The biographer Peter Raby comments that Wilde's interest had been further stimulated by descriptions of Gustave Moreau's paintings of Salome in Joris-Karl Huysmans's À rebours and by Heinrich Heine's Atta Troll, Jules Laforgue's "Salomé" in Moralités Légendaires and Stéphane Mallarmé's Hérodiade.

[3] Wilde wrote the play while staying in Paris and explained to an interviewer the following year why he had written it in French: I have one instrument that I know I can command, and that is the English language.

[4]He submitted the play to the leading French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who accepted it for production in her 1892 season at the Royal English Opera House, in London.

[6][n 2] The play was published in French in 1893 in Paris by the Librairie de l'Art Independent and in London by Elkin Mathews and John Lane.

[8] The author was pleased by the favourable reception given to the published play by leading Francophone writers, in particular Pierre Loti, Maurice Maeterlinck and Mallarmé.

All Salome's attempts to attract him fail, and he swears she will never kiss his mouth, cursing her as the daughter of an adulteress and advising her to seek the Lord.

Herodias dismisses his fears and asks him to go back inside with her, but Herod's attention has turned libidinously towards Salome, who rejects his advances.

When the prophet's head is brought to her, she passionately addresses Jokanaan as if he were still alive and finally kisses his lips: Herod, frightened and appalled at Salome's behaviour, orders the soldiers, "Tuez cette femme!"

[27] In 1901, within a year of Wilde's death, Salome was produced in Berlin by Max Reinhardt in Hedwig Lachmann's German translation,[28] and ran, according to Robbie Ross, for "a longer consecutive period in Germany than any play by any Englishman, not excepting Shakespeare".

[32] The Salomes included Evelyn Preer (1923), Sheryl Lee (1992) and Marisa Tomei (2003), and among the actors playing Herod was Al Pacino in 1992 and 2003.

[32] The play was given in Czech in Brno in 1924, and in English at the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1928 (directed by Hilton Edwards, with Micheál Mac Liammóir as Jokanaan).

The last "private" production, earlier that year, featuring a dance of the seven veils choreographed by Ninette de Valois, was judged "creepily impressive" by The Daily Telegraph.

[40] For the first sanctioned public production, at the Savoy Theatre, Farquharson reprised his Herod, with real-life mother and daughter casting, Nancy Price and Joan Maude as Herodias and Salome.

The production was deemed tame and unthrilling, and the play – "gone modest and middle class" as one critic put it – was not seen again in the West End for more than twenty years.

[45] In Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique, Edouard Stoullig reported that press reviews had been generally benevolent out of protest at the harsh treatment received by Wilde in Britain.

[12] In Le Figaro Henry Fouquier shared Stoullig's view that the piece owed something to Flaubert, and thought it "an exercise in romantic literature, not badly done, a little boring".

The colours, the stars, the birds, the rare gems, everything that adorns nature, has provided M. Wilde with points of comparison and ingenious themes for the stanzas and antistrophes that Salome's characters utter".

The Times described it as "an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred".

[50] New York reviewers were not impressed when the play was first professionally produced there in 1906: The Sun called it "bloodily degenerate"; The New-York Tribune thought it "decadent stuff, not worthy of notice".

[51] The historian John Stokes writes that Salome is a rare instance in British theatrical history of an authentically Symbolist drama.

[52] Critics have analysed Wilde's use of images favoured by Israel's kingly poets and references to the moon,[53] his depiction of power-play between the sexes,[54] his filling in of gaps in the biblical narrative[55] and his invention of the "dance of the seven veils".

[57] Critics including Horst Schroeder have argued that the international success of Strauss's adaptation "virtually drove Wilde's drama in its original form off the stage".

In St Petersburg in 1908 Mikhail Fokine created a ballet based on the play, with music by Glazunov and décor by Léon Bakst.