To describe it as a "symbolist drama" is neither untrue nor all of the necessary truth, for Wilde's play is both related to that movement and critical of it. The persisting difficulty is one of deciding just what kind of play this is and what Wilde sought to achieve by writing it. A radical split has evolved in critical discussion between those, like the anonymous writer for the Pall Mall Gazette, who regard the play as a variant on previous and superior work on the Salome theme and those, like Ellmann, who regard it as "anticipatory rather than derivative," and praise it for its incipient modernism. The odd combination of historical and avant-garde features that caused it to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain has provided recurring but different problems for others more favorably disposed toward the play. Although Wilde's Salome (1893) has justly been described as "the only completely successful symbolist drama to come out of the English theatre, has haunted the European imagination ever since," it is a play that has yet to receive a convincing performance on the English stage.
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