"wldms10" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilde Oscar)

Beardsley's illustrations are too well known to need more than a
passing reference. In the world of art criticism they excited
almost as much attention as Wilde's drama has excited in the world
of intellect.

During May 1905 the play was produced in England for the first time
at a private performance by the New Stage Club. No one present will
have forgotten the extraordinary tension of the audience on that
occasion, those who disliked the play and its author being
hypnotised by the extraordinary power of Mr. Robert Farquharson's
Herod, one of the finest pieces of acting ever seen in this country.
My friends the dramatic critics (and many of them are personal
friends) fell on Salome with all the vigour of their predecessors
twelve years before. Unaware of what was taking place in Germany,
they spoke of the play as having been 'dragged from obscurity.' The
Official Receiver in Bankruptcy and myself were, however, better
informed. And much pleasure has been derived from reading those
criticisms, all carefully preserved along with the list of receipts
which were simultaneously pouring in from the German performances.
To do the critics justice they never withdrew any of their printed
opinions, which were all trotted out again when the play was
produced privately for the second time in England by the Literary
Theatre Society in 1906. In the Speaker of July 14th, 1906,
however, some of the iterated misrepresentations of fact were
corrected. No attempt was made to controvert the opinion of an
ignorant critic: his veracity only was impugned. The powers of
vaticination possessed by such judges of drama can be fairly tested
in the career of Salome on the European stage, apart from the opera.
In an introduction to the English translation published by Mr. John
Lane it is pointed out that Wilde's confusion of Herod Antipas
(Matt. xiv. 1) with Herod the Great (Matt. ii. 1) and Herod Agrippa
I. (Acts xii. 23) is intentional, and follows a mediaeval
convention. There is no attempt at historical accuracy or
archaeological exactness. Those who saw the marvellous decor of Mr.
Charles Ricketts at the second English production can form a
complete idea of what Wilde intended in that respect; although the
stage management was clumsy and amateurish. The great opera of
Richard Strauss does not fall within my province; but the fag ends
of its popularity on the Continent have been imported here oddly
enough through the agency of the Palace Theatre, where Salome was
originally to have been performed. Of a young lady's dancing, or of
that of her rivals, I am not qualified to speak. I note merely that
the critics who objected to the horror of one incident in the drama
lost all self-control on seeing that incident repeated in dumb show
and accompanied by fescennine corybantics. Except in 'name and
borrowed notoriety' the music-hall sensation has no relation
whatever to the drama which so profoundly moved the whole of Europe
and the greatest living musician. The adjectives of contumely are
easily transmuted into epithets of adulation, when a prominent
ecclesiastic succumbs, like King Herod, to the fascination of a