In Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique, Edouard Stoullig reported that press reviews had been generally benevolent out of protest at the harsh treatment received by Wilde in Britain. In Stoullig's view the play was a good piece of rhetoric marred by too many "ridiculous repetitions" of lines by minor characters.[12] In Le Figaro Henry Fouquier shared Stoullig's view that the piece owed something to Flaubert, and thought it "an exercise in romantic literature, not badly done, a little boring".[11] The reviewer in Le Temps said, "M. Wilde has certainly read Flaubert, and cannot forget it. The most interesting thing about Salome is the style. The work was written in French by M. Wilde. It is full of very elaborate and ornate verses. The colours, the stars, the birds, the rare gems, everything that adorns nature, has provided M. Wilde with points of comparison and ingenious themes for the stanzas and antistrophes that Salome's characters utter".[46] La Plume said, "Salomé has almost all the qualities of a poem, the prose is as musical and fluid as verse, full of images and metaphors".[47]
When banning the original 1892 production of Salome, the responsible official in the Lord Chamberlain's office commented privately, "The piece is written in French – half Biblical, half pornographic – by Oscar Wilde himself. Imagine the average British public's reception of it".[48] In Britain the critics in general either ignored or disparaged the play. The Times described it as "an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive, and very offensive in its adaptation of scriptural phraseology to situations the reverse of sacred".[49] The Pall Mall Gazette suggested that the play was far from original: "the reader of Salome seems to stand in the Island of Voices, and to hear around him and about the utterances of friends, the whisperings of demigods" – particularly Gautier, Maeterlinck and above all Flaubert – "There is no freshness in Mr Wilde's ideas; there is no freshness in his method of presenting those ideas".[50] New York reviewers were not impressed when the play was first professionally produced there in 1906: The Sun called it "bloodily degenerate"; The New-York Tribune thought it "decadent stuff, not worthy of notice".[31]
Raby comments that later criticism of the play "has tended to treat it either as a literary text or as a theatrical aberration".[51] The historian John Stokes writes that Salome is a rare instance in British theatrical history of an authentically Symbolist drama. Symbolist authors rejected naturalism and used "poetic language and pictorial settings to invoke the inner lives of characters", expressing without the constraints of naturalism all kinds of emotions "both spiritual and sensual".[52]
