 Felly mae'n gweld â'r cyffredinol yn gallu y llyfr, y llyfr dweud y rhan o'r pethau o'r ei ddefnyddio i ddweud yn dweud yn oed yn eu syniadau, a'r ddefnyddio i ddeud yn defnyddio i ddweud. Mae'r ystafell o'r ddweud yn ymwysig o'r rhan o'r cwrsiau i ddweud o'r ffordd o gweithio, o'r ffordd o ffordd o'r gweithio, o'r ddechrau ymdaint o'r ffordd o'r llwyddoedd y Salome. byddwch y cyngor maen nhw'n gilydd ar yr tygwyrau. Fuddem ddoch chi'n gilydd ffazio ar gywe. Ond yn ymddangos, wrth gwrs, mae'n gilydd deso eu hynny'n gwybod i'w gweithlo. Fodd fel ddim eich synod am gael eich ddau. A byddwch iddy'r cyngor rydych chi, yn rhian gyrfa a'r llythydd yr hynny, rydych chi'n chi oedd, rwyf yn y gallu llythydd o'r llythydd, pan rydyn ni dda chi ddaeth eich ymddangos. I was going to call it, always leave them wanting more. But that's quite a risky title. So I decided against that one. And I also thought, oh, cigarettes and absents and wild, wild women, which would certainly draw the crowds. But I was interested to put the cigarette at the centre of this, because it is in many ways at the centre of wild's own life. He is often photographed, as you can see, carrying a cigarette, smoking one. Now, as we know, cigarettes are very bad for you. They're a particularly dangerous form of pleasure, because they cause increasing damage whilst you kind of keep wanting more. That's how it operates. Now, the Victorians didn't entirely know this, though my medical commentators, some of them had noticed that smoking might be quite bad for you. But the Victorians didn't actually know that smoking gives you cancer or gives you a stroke or all of those things. But they did disapprove of it, because, frankly, anything that's a pleasure doesn't quite fit with that rather prissy notion of what the Victorians are all about. And for wild, that was part of its attraction, of course. The joke about the perfect pleasure of the cigarette is one of the things he keeps going back to. It's one of his favourite jokes. The very formidable Lady Bracknell comments in the importance of being earnest against the grain of normal expectations that smoking is a very suitable occupation for an eligible bachelor. Well, it's better than banking. And the bachelor characters in the decay of lying smoke is a matter, of course, all the way through their discourse on art and morality. Wild himself famously appeared on the stage of the premiere of Lady Windermere's fan wearing a green carnation in his buttonhole and smoking a cigarette as he congratulated his audience on their excellent taste in approving of his play. And a lot of people were very shocked by that. And I think part of the issue with the cigarette for Wild is that it's actually also a slightly effeminate symbol. It was very much associated with the new woman in the 1890s, along with her bicycle, her 20-a-day habit, was the new woman's calling card, virtually. But it's not the cigarette per se that matters here, despite its rather over-determined fundusieca exoticism. It's the fact that it's defined as a perfect pleasure and that perfection is itself defined by the fact that you're never satisfied with it. It does always leave you wanting more. So that's sort of part of what I'm getting at, I guess. Now, a certain Sigmund Freud would probably have said that sometimes a cigarette's just a cigarette. It is also, amongst other things, a metaphor. Reeds of smoke and loosh. I like word loosh. Loosh is one of my favourite words. Loosh associations and its fatality. It stands for lots of different sorts of forbidden pleasures. It doesn't appear at all in Salome. So I don't know why I'm doing this, except I kind of think it almost might. It doesn't even appear in Aubrey Beardley's non-illustrative illustrations for Salome. Though he might actually have got away with it in one of the illustrations to Salome. There's a series of 1890s texts which obviously Salome could not have read in her boudoir. So it could have been there, but it wasn't. But I think what I'm interested in is that it stands for the circulation of desire that can't be met. So that you keep wanting, you keep wanting. And that, I think, is very important to Wild in general. We keep finding it over and over again. One of the origins of this paper was that I was commissioned to write something for the 40th anniversary of the publication of Jean-François Lyotard's book, Libidinal Economy, which I'm sure you all know inside out. Well, even if you don't, it doesn't matter very much. There's a sort of key metaphor at the heart of that book, which is the mobius strip. And what Lyotard suggests in his book is that it's a book which combines both Marxism and Freudianism, if you like, and was consequently very shocking in its own time in 1974 when it was first published. What he's getting at in his title and in that image of the mobius strip is that you can't easily separate desire for people, your sexual desires, your objects of lust, if you like, from your desires for things, your capitalist desires, the way that you might buy new shoes or have a new book or a new record to kind of satisfy some other thing that's going on in your head. In other words, you can't easily say that there's libidinal desire and that there's capitalist desire and that those two things are different. And the mobius strip suggests that they might actually be on a continuum, that they're the same. And that may also be important for what I want to think about in Salome. So, do you know it? I mean, some people will, some people won't. I might do a small amount of just telling you a bit about it. Cos it's not like Wilde's normal works. It's very, very distinctive and very different. Every critical commentary on Salome says it's not like the importance of being earnest, it's not like Lady Windermere's fan. One of his recent critics has said, how is it possible that the same writer who made a name for himself through writing comedies of manners like Ernest also wrote a play like Salome? I mean, it just doesn't seem to compute. They don't seem to be able to make much sense of it. And the anomaly of Salome, a phrase I was quite worried I wasn't going to be able to say, actually, is all the more remarkable because of its composition and very fraught publication history. It was written in French, which is the first thing you need to know about it, so the Irishman writes in French because English, of course, is a foreign language. It was intended to be performed by Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. But when he applied for a licence for performance in 1891, it was denied a licence for performance by the Lord Chamberlain's office. So it wasn't performed in Britain at all, ever in wildlife time. It was then translated, badly. What can I say really? It is quite a poor translation, the one we use by Lord Alfred Douglas. Produced in a sumptuous publication, it's actually a very beautiful book illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley, the only artist who would understand what the dance of the seven fails would be as Wild was to put it. And it's absolutely odd and strange compared to everything else. The other plays that everyone knows are comedies of manners. We all kind of know that. And they're set in what looks like a realistic world. Though, to be fair, I have to say that Wild is also very keen to show that it's an extremely artificial world, this world of the upper classes in Britain in the 1890s. The other plays are all intensely commercial. They've always been successful. You can put them on, you'll always get an audience, it's brilliant. This is not true of Salome, which gets put on about once a generation, and usually as an experiment, let's just see what it feels like to do it. So the comedies share a decor, a set of stock characters, a set of situations. They function in the realm of epigrammatic wit. Portentous people are laughed at. It's all very light hearted, even when quite serious things happen. It's all on the surface kind of okay. In Salome, we are in the world, the biblical world of Herod Antipas in Israel at the time of Christ and John the Baptist. So you can tell straight away where somewhere else. Instead of focusing on a clearly defined genre, which is where Wilde had his major successes, we've moved to something else, a world marked by experiment. This play is really not typically wild in. Having said that, one of the things I do argue in my recent book on Wilde is that Wilde always manipulated genre. Genre is about giving you expectations and giving audiences what they think they want. So you sign something with the name Wilde and people will turn up expecting a particular kind of thing. If you tell them that Wilde's written a tragedy, which is what Salome is, a spoiler alert, she does die at the end, it's all very sad. But you get the kind of picture here. If you tell them it's a tragedy, one of the things you don't expect to happen is that we occasionally just fall about laughing. Because it's a very weird play and the Stephen Bercoff production, which some of you may have seen a long time ago now, 1989, one of the things that did really brilliantly at the National Theatre was to point out that actually there's a certain element of farce to this tragedy, that it's kind of a crazy idea that you can be serious all the time in exactly the same way as it's a crazy idea that you can laugh all the time. Having said all of that as well as tragedy and we laugh at it, it is also ridiculous. It's parody of all the things that you might expect to find in a symbolist drama, various commentators have pointed that out. The most famous of whom is Mario Pras, whose book, The Romantic Agony, is definitely to be recommended. Everybody should read that book. Pras says it's a parody of the whole of the material used by the decadence and of the stammering mannerisms of Materlink's drama and as parody it is close to being a masterpiece. So, there you are. But it does border on the ridiculous, he says. Well, it is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. But it's kind of interesting as well. What I think happens in a play like this is that whereas in the comedies, Wild Offers are really an interesting corrective to the punitive Victorian morality of the kind of society he was actually living in, so you laugh at the people who take that morality most seriously. There can be no tragedy in the modern world. That's the argument that he's almost making, that tragedy actually can only happen where there's savagery. And so in order to see that savagery play out, you have to go back in time. This is Wild himself. I just have to keep checking it's there. I don't know why I get so worried that it might not be there, but it is. This is Wild himself saying that he doesn't really believe that tragedy should deal with modern life. So he asks the question, should it deal with the society of middle class existence? These are questions purely to the artist's own choice. Personally, I like my comedy to be intensely modern and I like my tragedy to walk in purple and to be remote. But these are whims, really. So, to turn really to Salome itself and to where it comes from. Any brief glance at the late 19th century will tell you that Salome was incredibly vogue-ish as a subject for art and literature from the 1860s onwards. Salome is absolutely everywhere. The biblical account of her story was expanded to speak to the period's own concerns. To its own orientalist fantasies, really. The Orient, the Middle East being the place where you can displace all of your weird desires. You can put them somewhere else because they're not here and they're not now. So the Middle East becomes the repository in late Victorian culture of sexual immorality and impropriety, a decadent assault on the sacred cows of organised religion. She's associated with John the Baptist, of course. You get to be a bit blasphemous as well. It ticks every box. What's not to like? I'm really often repeated image in the late 19th century and one of the things I just quickly wanted to do was to show you that because I don't expect you to take my word for it. So I've got just collections and collections. Just by googling, actually, I could have picked up 60 images from between 1860 and 1910. I didn't even have to do any research, is what I'm suggesting there. So all of those, I think, are images that really focus on the Byzantine Middle East. Lots of jewels, a very rich decor. But at its centre, a naked woman. Why wouldn't you want to paint a naked woman? But it's respectable. You're allowed to do this because it's far away. It's been put somewhere else. You couldn't represent a western white woman in these circumstances. Not in this period anyway. One of the things that really struck me as I was going through the pictures was that you'd be astonished by how many of them are knives and plates pictures. So it's like they're kind of doing something to say this is domesticity gone horribly wrong. But you get the idea, don't you? And then they do, I think, become extremely sexualised. There comes a moment where they become very sexualised. Max Oppenhower's painting there is really quite shocking. Really does make the Freudian point that decapitation and castration might be quite closely related. Would you like me to take that one down? Don't have nightmares. I can go back or... I'll leave it there. Brilliant critic called Bram Jyxtra, who's collected together a really interesting set of late 19th century images of women, says that Salome is the figure of the femme fatale for the period. A fruitful image because she combined a dubious sexual reputation. Dancing girls are always rude. We kind of know this, don't we, in Victorian culture. With a fatality, which is a direct attack on institutional religion. She's nicely exotic, which is only a letter away from erotic, of course. And she combines a powerful and unfeminine, voracious sexuality with interesting exotic artistic potential. In the turn of the century imagination, Jyxtra says, the figure of Salome epitomised the potential perversity of women, their eternal circularity and their ability to destroy the male. Stop there for a moment, because actually, of course, this isn't what really ever happens. The femme fatale is an image and an imaginary thing. I think women get destroyed by men slightly more often. In reality, as well as in artistic production. I think the artists were repeatedly drawn to this image because she's a sexualised female body that you are licensed to look at. It's okay to have a look at a dancer because dancers are performing. So it's fine. Alongside the pictorial images, which proliferate, there are an awful lot of Salome's in literature, largely in French literature. But there are an awful lot. It really begins, I think, with Flaubert's story, Eurydias, from 1859, which is from a collection called Three Stories or Three Tales. I have put on here a little... Well, I've put the whole thing, actually. I've put the description that Flaubert offers us of the dance of the seven veils. I'm not sure I want to read all of it, but I just wanted you to see how big this description was because there's another slide. There's more. Which focuses on this incredibly erotic dance which provokes frenzy in the audience who sees it. Anybody writing about Salome, and especially if you do it in French, after the 1850s, 1860s period, knows this description and they are making reference to it one way or another. It's enormously significant, I think. I'll say it goes on. In fact, it goes on quite a lot. But you'll notice that what I did was to just underline a couple of statements. One was that Herodias and... So that's the mother figure, Salome's mother. Herodias and Salome look like each other. That it's mother and daughter's plot which I think is quite interesting. The other is the ambiguity of this dance. You couldn't tell whether she was mourning for a god or expiring in his embrace. Is this sex or death? Or both? Yes, is the answer, really. I just wanted to go. Maude Allen asked me about her at the end. I haven't got time to talk about her as part of this but she's ever so interesting as well. Towards the end of that description you get an awful lot of flaring nostrils amongst the Pharisees and the... You can make a lot of those as a postroidian, I think. OK. What I'm intrigued by in Flaubert's depiction is that the dancers Flaubert presents it offers no complete fulfilment of the desire it dramatises and provokes. So you watch it and you are provoked. In that sense it's obscene. That's one of the definitions of pornography that are provoked. And then it's over. And just to show that Aubrey Beardley really did know that the Flaubert thing, all women become like their mothers, these two drawings, the left-hand drawing was suppressed for fairly obvious reasons, I think. So they weren't allowed to put that one into press because it's got a penis in it and this was not permitted. You can show bosons in the 1890s but penises are not allowed. Anyway. Now, Wilde definitely knew his Flaubert. He'd also met Malamais who wrote a very interesting version of Salamais. He was friends with various people in the artistic scene. He met Gustave Moreau, for example. So there are lots of moments where he's come across French versions of Salamais. And amongst the many comments that are made about Salamais when it's published is that one of the things that's really nasty about Salamais is that it's very, very French. And worse than that, it's plagiarised. That he's nicked it from the French. So it's French which is bad enough. But it's nasty as well because it's cheating. So this is a review. Which I've quoted at length because I actually think it says some dead interesting things, actually. Salamais is a mosaic. So there's a middle eastern image of art. The mosaic is the Byzantine form. Mr Wilde has many masters and the influence of each master asserts itself in his pages. A stripes of different colours assert themselves in stuffs from the east. The reader of Salamais seems to stand in the island of voices and to hear around him the utterances of friends, the whisperings of demigods. Now it is the voice of Gautier who also wrote a version of Salamais, painting pictures in words of princesses and jewels and flowers and unduants. And on it is Mitalanc who speaks. The chorus seems to be swelled by the speech of the silver of Anatole France, perchance by the speech of gold of Marcel Schwab. But the voices that breathe life into Salamais are dominated by one voice, the voice of Flobert. If Flobert had not written Salambo, which is a slightly later version of his Salamais story, if Flobert had not written la tentacion de Saint-Antoine or the Temptation of Saint Anthony, all if Flobert had not written Herodias Salamais might boast an originality to which she cannot now and at lay claim. Nicked it off Flobert. Well, if you're going to nick off somebody, nick off Flobert, it's the obvious place to go. Her bones want strength. Her flesh wants vitality. Her blood is polluted. There is no pulse of passion in her. Brilliant review, actually. I mean it's a nasty, nasty review, but it's brilliant. Quoted it at length because it combines lots of quite astute commentary with something that's almost parodic of Wild himself. There's something very sharp about this. The overblown rhetoric of the play is picked up, I think, in this review. And it clearly identifies his key sources, so all the people he's stolen from. Mosea, as I said right at the start, is exactly the right metaphor for a play which draws on the artistic traditions of the Middle East. What else would you use? And it skews Wild's pretensions in a thinly veiled accusation of plagiarism. And that is spoken in really vicious terms. That this is degenerate art. That his salome wants flesh for her bones, wants passion. She's a sort of feeble product of a diseased imagination is what's being suggested. Okay. Now, the reviewer's right. This is the source. But he's wrong to suggest that Wild brings nothing new to the story of Salome. In Flobert's version of the story, the dance itself, as we saw, is rendered in sumptuous and very, very lengthy detail. Wild's play notoriously reduces the dance of the seven veils to a single stage direction which reads in its entirety, Salome dances the dance of the seven veils. I leave it to your imagination what she does. He's certainly expected, whilst certainly expected, his audience to know. They'd read Flobert. They'd create what Flobert had already written. He also says repeatedly in letters and in his epigrams that imagination is more important than being told what to think, that it's your imagination as a recipient of text that matters most. So, broadly speaking, perhaps he's right. But I would also say that what he brings to the play, is really distinctive and almost feminist. I have some dance, but really distinctive and almost feminist is that Salome acts on her own behalf in his play. In the biblical story and in most of the other versions, Salome asks for the head of John the Baptist as part of the reward, the dancer's reward, because her mother tells her to. It's a very important shift to have the young woman say, I do not heed my mother. It is for my own delight, I ask, for the head of Yocanal. So that's one of the reasons that I think is quite significant. The other thing I think that's brought to the story is that Salome, because she has this consciousness of her own desires, also analyses what those desires might be. And she speaks those desires brilliantly and repeatedly. And you have to sort of think that to some extent this is an excuse for wild to spend quite a lot of time fetishising a male-blood body. Because if she dances the dance of the seven veils, something for the dads, as you might say, at the same time, she is fetishising John the Baptist's body. She talks about it obsessively and repeatedly a lot. There's a lot going on in her descriptions of that body. So something for the other dads, I guess. And maybe for the mums, I don't know. Of course, they didn't get to see it, so we'll never know how they would have responded. OK, so. It's a really perverse world we enter when we enter this world of Salome. If you know the play, it opens with a conversation between two beautiful young men, a young Syrian and Herodias' page. And they are in conversation with each other. The Woman in the Moon is Aubrey Beardley's title on that particular illustration. It's a bit of a nasty joke at Wild's expense because when you look at the moon, what you can immediately see if you know what Wild looked like is that that is a cartoon of Wild. Another suppressed one. Anyway, young Syrian. How beautiful is the Princess Salome tonight? Page of Herodias. Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems. She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. It goes on like this for ages, by the way. I'll keep it quite short. Now, in the original version, I think she was looking for dead things. She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil and whose feet are of silver. She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet. You would fancy she was dancing. She is like a woman who is dead. She moves very slowly. In the original French, there is a really willful confusion between which she is being described, because in French, of course, it's all L. Is it the Princess Salome, or is it the moon, is the question? It's a bit more difficult to kind of make that connection in this passage here when you've translated it into English. But even so, even here, you can see that there comes this moment where you're thinking, moon or princess, which one am I talking about? Now, the signifier for the word she then is in the eye of the beholder. And in this masculine libidinal economy, it's through the eye that desire is provoked. Men get their kicks by looking, I think, is the idea here. Okay? For the page, all this looking at Salome is dangerous. Nice girls shouldn't look at goblin men. I was talking about Christina Rosetti this morning. So, you know, you shouldn't look, it's dangerous to look. Nice boys shouldn't look or touch when the object in question is a princess and you're not of the same status. It's dangerous to look. You must not look at her, he says, over and over again. Something terrible will happen, he says, over and over again. And it does. Something terrible does happen. It's dangerous to look at people in such a fashion, he says. But the Syrian boy can't stop looking. And as he looks, he defines Salome in a series of similes that focus on her whiteness. You could say the barren symbol of her purity, you could say the symbol of her innocence and virginity, I don't know. He goes on and on about how white she is, using an extremely cliched poetic repertoire, to be honest. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver. Her little white hands are fluttering like doves. They are like white butterflies. She is like a dove that has strayed. She is like a narcissist trembling in the wind. She is like a silver flower and on and on and on. Over many pages and many hours. Well, it feels like that in performance anyway. And, of course, he goes on repeatedly to say, she is like the moon. That over-determined contradictory symbol of feminine purity, Diana the Huntress and all of that. Apocalypse, moon turns to blood, terrible business. And then, of course, of the less attractive feminine markers of menstruation and lunacy. And all of those things are going to appear in their turn. Salamé is being compared then to a series of things that women always get compared to. And part of the problem is that she might not, in fact, be like any of them. All of these things that she's meant to be like and maybe she's not like any of them. The Syrian isn't the only one to look. What happens to the Syrian is he kills himself. He realises that he's never going to be able to touch. He kills himself. The page who has been ogling the Syrian, a very quietly understated gay moment there, I think, mourns for the Syrian for the rest of the play. So something terrible does happen. But the Syrian is not the only one to look. Hang on, sorry, I've obviously skipped a bit. Why does the tetrarch, Salamé says, look at me all the while with his moles' eyes under his shaking eyelids. It is strange that the husband of my mother looks at me like that. I know not what it means. Of a truth, I know what it means. I think that's a very important moment where she goes. She does the kind of innocent, no, I can't imagine what he's looking at. Oh, yeah, actually, I really, I know. Really, I know. The mother of my husband doesn't make him her father, by the way. This is an incestuous marriage. Her father, sorry, Herod has married his brother's wife. So it's a complicated business. The point about that moment of truth, I know it too well, is that she's just understood something quite important about her own sexual potency. She's understood for the first time the effects that her looks have on a particular kind of man. And that power remains intact so long as they don't touch, so long as there is a Nole metandre around her. The king can look as much as he likes. He's a king. But when he commands her to dance, he can't make her do it. He can't make her do it just by saying so. She undermines his power as a king. So long as she's the object of other people's desires, rather than somebody who has desires of her own, it's all very normal and very safe. What causes the tragedy is her sudden realisation that she feels things provoked by John the Baptist, and she suddenly goes, actually I want something. So instead of being an object who is desired, she becomes a subject who desires. Now the play does go on. It keeps repeating the same things. It's like a fugue, I think, in structure. It's got these kind of themes that repeats. It's actually quite difficult to talk about because I keep realising that I'm repeating myself, sort of, because the play itself repeats itself. So as I move on to each next stage, I suddenly think, I sort of said some of this before. But there comes a moment where the tetra comes out onto the balcony to have a look round, see what's going on. He looks at the moon and he says, I think, the moon has a strange look tonight. You can see the repeating thing. Everybody looks at the moon, everybody goes a bit mad, I think. The moon has a strange look tonight. Has she not a strange look? She is like a mad woman, lunacy. A mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers. She is naked too. She is quite naked. She shows herself naked in the sky. She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman. Does she not real like a drunken woman? She is like a mad woman. Has she not? Imagine Stephen Bercoff saying those lines. He did it much better than I've just done it. Because it was a crescendo. He wanted people to agree with him. And everybody was looking at him as if to say, you're nuts, you are. That's just bonket. There is only one answer. I've broken your thing. The red light's still on. The red light's still on. I haven't broken your thing. He fell off. I've got wild now. There's only one answer to people talking such errant nonsense as that. And it comes from Herodias who says, no, the moon is the moon. That is all. And the that is all is a line that Wilde repeatedly uses in the comedies, by the way. So his way of saying definitely that's the answer. But I think the most significant commentary of all on the moon comes from Salome herself. And when she comes in, she also makes the connection between the moon and herself. And all those repetitious echoes and metaphors that have already existed, that have already been spoken, are spoken again by her. Whereas Herod's a bit bothered by the moon, he's a bit freaked out by it, she says, how good to see the moon. It's nice to see the moon. She is like a little piece of money, a little silver flower. She is cold and chaste. I'm sure she's a virgin. She has the beauty of the virgin. Yes, she is a virgin. She has never defiled herself. She has never abandoned herself to men like the other goddesses. Now, what fascinates me most here is the metaphor that no one else has used. And it's that the moon, which is like Salome, is like a little piece of money. And it's not in any of the other sources. It doesn't exist anywhere else. This is the moment where I think the play becomes really original. Because what it points out is that she has understood her object status as an object of exchange between men. Regina Gania has this wonderful phrase about Wild's Work. She talks about Wild's Work always being concerned with the interface between romance and finance. And there it is. It's in that moment. She's like a little piece of money. So the moon in the play is a solipsistic signifier. It's whatever you see it as being. As Wild has told us elsewhere, the highest as the lowest form of criticism is a motorborder biography. You smelt it, you dealt it, really. You see it, that's what it is. It's whatever you make it mean. And the responsibility for meaning is put onto the viewer, not onto the poet. So what we make this play mean is our responsibility too. What I make this play mean, what I think this play means, is an attempt to negotiate ideas about desire without really a language in which to do it and without a conceptual framework in which to do it. It's not possible quite yet for somebody like Wild to understand or think through the full implications of the idea that you cannot have a reasonable libidinal relationship if you treat the other as object. It happens with John the Baptist because, of course, what happens to John the Baptist is he's beheaded. So he does become very much an object. All those pictures sort of suggested that there he was a head on a plate. And it's the end of desire because when Salome has this head on a plate she can't get a response from him. In fact, I think that's one, yes. He's a nothing. There is no gaze coming back. And she asks him, why didn't you respond to me when you had the chance? And, of course, there's no point in asking that question at the end point because he's not going to respond now. He's quite definitely dead. So, what Wild gives us in a coded way is a space of polymorphous perversity. Everybody desires somebody and nobody gets their desires fulfilled. There is nobody satisfied at the end of this play. So the Syrian fancies Salome, she doesn't even notice him. The page fancies the Syrian and the Syrian kills himself because his love is unrequited. The play ends with Herod having watched her dance, the dance of the seven veils, and understood it as perverse. And he says, kill that woman. The last line of the play is just kill her because he can't deal with it anymore. His desires are not fulfilled. The only person who's immune is Herodias because she doesn't really do desiring at all. She's sort of outside that economy completely. Wild's asking us to think about how we can manufacture a way of having equal relationships. He hasn't worked it out because they're not equal. In this play, none of the relationships are equal. I'm not sure he ever works it out and he clearly didn't work it out in his own life either. But the experiment is worth the doing because actually the questions it raises are still questions we're thinking about now. They haven't gone away. That kind of is it, really. Thank you very much for that.