Salome: A Tragedy in One Act, Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde, Pictured by Aubrey Beardsley.

Oscar Wilde

Salome: A Tragedy in One Act, Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde, Pictured by Aubrey Beardsley.

London:

Elkin Mathews and John Lane,

1894.

Inscribed by Aubrey Beardsley to Brandon Thomas.

So frustrating did Beardsley find the experience of collaborating with Oscar Wilde that he swore he would never repeat it and later resolved to exclude Wilde from The Yellow Book, after he became its art editor. But Beardsley got his own back, creating drawings for the English-language publication of Salome that had little to do with the action of the drama. Several were of naked, androgynous bodies; some images also incorporated caricatures of its author. Of the latter, the most obvious and wittily insulting was The Woman in the Moon, used as the book’s frontispiece, with Wilde’s face made round and lunar. This copy was presented by Beardsley to the actor Brandon Thomas (1848–1914), famed for writing the cross-dressing comedy, Charley’s Aunt (1892), with whom Beardsley, who had theatrical ambitions himself, hoped to write a play.

From the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press