Salome and the Wildean Art of Symbolist Theatre

Abstract

"My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment," Yeats recalled in his autobiography; "I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous." Readers of Wilde's writings, and audiences of his plays, have often had this same paradoxical impression of evident craft and spontaneity. For generations, those same readers and audiences have consistently associated the man with the writings and the writings with the man. Walter Pater described this viva-voce quality in his review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, where he praised Wilde for writing like the voice of a man speaking. "There is always something of an excellent talker" about his writing, Pater said, "and, in his hands, as happens so rarely with those who practise it, the form of dialogue is justified by its being really alive.”

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