Only Herodias sees the moon as merely the moon, and she is obviously the most vulgar person in the play, a person without, so to speak, a personality.

Salome, somewhat in the mode of Medea, Lady Macbeth, and Phaedra, is a figure whose powerful feelings are essentially destructive; but if she is a femme fatale, she is, like other tragic figures, to be judged not chiefly in ethical terms or in terms of worldly success but in terms of intensity of feeling. Salome is shocking when she strips the veils from her body, but this act of revelation is a sort of prelude to a more important revelation, the revelation of her innermost being, when she fully bares her passion by kissing the severed head: “I love thee yet Jokanaan, I love only thee.” Although the comparison may sound outrageous, in a way there is a kind of analogy here with King Lear, who also strips off his clothing as his mental experience becomes more and more painful, more and more extreme, until we are left with nothing but his passion. The intensity—far more than the ethical quality—of the tragic figure’s experience is what makes the figure an object of awe in the eyes of the spectator. If we take Lear as a model and remember the tribute paid to this passionate man at the end of the play (“we that are young / Shall never see so much”), we can say that the tragic figure comes curiously close to subscribing to Pater’s remark in the Conclusion to The Renaissance, “Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.”

Herod, like Herodias, of course survives; but he is presumably a broken man, a minor tragic figure (a sort of Creon, to Salome’s Antigone?) who must live with the knowledge that he has done a deed of horror. (For all of its apparent unconventionality, Salome embodies the basic irony of a conventional tragic plot. Characters passionately desire something—Herod desires to see Salome dance, Salome desires the head of John the Baptist—and they get what they want; but they must pay a price greater than they had imagined.) Herodias alone is triumphant in the world (she loses her daughter, but we feel that she is chiefly concerned with humiliating Herod); she is successful because she is the most trivial person in the play. If she is in some ways the most “real” person in Salome, she is to the artist and to the audience the least interesting. “Nothing that actually occurs,” Wilde wrote in 1884, “is of the smallest importance.” Given his esthetic views, Wilde might have said that no one who fails to feel intensely is of the smallest importance.

Salome was not the first of Wilde’s nine plays. As early as 1880 he had written Vera; or The Nihilists, a tragedy about a socialist who falls in love with a young man who turns out to be the son of the Czar. Ordered to shoot him, she instead commits suicide. The young man succeeds his father, with promises of social reform, so Vera’s sacrifice is justified. The play is negligible as drama, but its political implications anticipate Wilde’s essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1890) and the social interests of some of the comedies. His second play, The Duchess of Padua (1883), in the tradition of Elizabethan and Jacobean revenge tragedy uses blank verse for the higher figures, comic prose for the lower, and all in all reads like a pastiche of Renaissance drama though it was seriously intended. But Wilde had already established himself as a literary personality, and especially as a witty speaker both at the dinner table and on the platform. His American tour, which occupied him during much of 1882, was a great success, surprising even to his agent. The idea for a tour originated with Rich rd D‘Oyly Carte, who thought that Wilde—regarded as the symbol of Art for Art’s Sake—would furnish good publicity for D’Oyly Carte’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience, a spoof on the Aesthetic Movement. Wilde, quite willing to exploit himself and to continue the role of the dandy already established in England by George (Beau) Brummel and Benjamin Disraeli, obliged by wearing a velvet jacket, knee-breeches, and silk stockings (this garb was strictly for American consumption) and by lecturing on art and household decorations—as well as on dress reform and on the revolutionary Irish poets of 1848. His important writing begins in the late 1880’s, and from 1888 to 1895 he produced most of the work for which he is remembered: stories, critical essays, a novel, Salome, and four witty plays—Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest. After his arrest, conviction, and imprisonment in 1895, he produced chiefly letters—including the enormously long one, De Profundis—and, in 1897, after his release from jail, the only poem of his that seems to have any popular reputation, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

It is to the comedies that we now turn. Wilde himself turned to this form at the suggestion of a young actor-manager, George Alexander, who, impressed by the witty conversationalist, urged Wilde to write a modern comedy. It should be mentioned that although there is no merit in the view occasionally suggested that much of the “poetic” language of Salome is intended as a parody, a few passages in Salome certainly were intended to be at least faintly amusing. A single brief example: “The Tetrarch does not care to see dead bodies save the bodies of those whom he himself has slain.”

Lady Windermere’s Fan, written near Lake Windermere in the fall of 1891, combines Wilde’s comic gift with his interest in social issues. The play had its premier early in 1892, and though the critical reviews were mixed, it was a popular—which is to say a financial—success. The wit is evident enough even today, but the social commentary now seems so muted as to be almost invisible. We can begin with the wit. The chief epigrammatist is Lord Darlington, who says such things as “I can resist everything except temptation,” “[A cynic is] a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing,” and “Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about it.” Lord Darlington by no means speaks all of the epigrams, however, probably because Wilde could not resist the temptation to make the play sparkle throughout. Moreover, fairly early in the play Darlington reveals that he has feelings: he is in love with Lady Windermere and seeks to persuade her to leave her husband. This means that he is no longer entirely suited to act the role of the witty, apparently dispassionate commentator on life, and so in large measure the wit is then assigned to others, for instance to Dumby, who delights us with such lines as, “The youth of the present day are quite monstrous. They have no respect for dyed hair.” Although wit, especially in the form of paradoxical and apparently unfeeling utterances, is an emblem of the dandy, the dandy is not to be regarded as a mere jester. He wears the mask of indifference, but he feels keenly. Baudelaire’s “Le Dandy” (1846), as well as other writings, had argued that (in Baudelaire’s words) “Dandyism is not, as many unthinking people seem to suppose, an immoderate interest in personal appearance and material elegance.