ABSTRACT
The reviewer, in his column ‘Books of the Week’, preceded his notice of Salomé with one of Ibsen’s The Master Builder, which he characterized as ‘intolerably dull as a drama and repulsively morbid as a picture of human nature’. (Ollendorff’s exercises were a popular method of language instruction stressing repetitive patterns.)
Of Mr. Oscar Wilde’s Salomé: Drame en un Acte (Elkin Mathews and John Lane), we are constrained to express an equally unfavourable opinion. This is the play, written for Mme. Sarah Bernhardt, for performance in this country. It is an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred. It is not ill-suited to some of the less attractive phases of Mme. Bernhardt’s dramatic genius, as it is vigorously written in some parts. As a whole, it does credit to Mr. Wilde’s command of the French language, but we must say that the opening scene reads to us very like a page from one of Ollendorff’s exercises.
