Suggestions
Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.Please wait while we process your payment
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
Please wait while we process your payment
By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy.
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Create Your Account
Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial
Already have an account? Log in
Your Email
Choose Your Plan
Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!
Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?
Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!
Price
$24.99 $18.74 /subscription + tax
Subtotal $37.48 + tax
Save 25% on 2-49 accounts
Save 30% on 50-99 accounts
Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.
Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
SparkNotes Plus
You'll be billed after your free trial ends.
7-Day Free Trial
Not Applicable
Renews March 29, 2023 March 22, 2023
Discounts (applied to next billing)
DUE NOW
US $0.00
SNPLUSROCKS20 | 20% Discount
This is not a valid promo code.
Discount Code (one code per order)
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
Choose Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!
You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.
Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.
Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.
Please wait while we process your payment
Your PLUS subscription has expired
Please wait while we process your payment
Please wait while we process your payment
The First Soldier insists that they transport the Syrian's body or risk Herod's discovery of it. The Page moans that the Syrian was his brother and closer to him than one: he gave him perfume, earrings, a ring, and in the evening they would walk by the river. The Syrian would tell him of his country and gaze at himself in the river. Suddenly the court enters, Herod calling for Salomé, and Herodias reproaching him for always staring at her daughter. Herod muses on the "strange look" of the moon, comparing her to a drunken madwoman looking for lovers. Herodias replies that the "moon is like the moon, that is all" and bids him inside. Herod refuses, calling the servants to bring the festivities outside. Herodias knows all too well why he remains.
Herod slips on the blood of the Syrian and gasps at the ill omen; he also refuses to look on the corpse. The Soldiers feign not knowing why the Syrian killed himself. Herod remarks he thought Romans only did so. Tigellinus replies that some do—the Stoics—but that they are "perfectly ridiculous." Herod regrets the Syrian's death: he was fair to look at though he looked too much at Salomé. Upon the removal of the body, Herod feels a wind blowing and hears a beating of wings in the air. Herodias hears nothing and again bids him inside. Herod invites Salomé to drink from his cup so he might drain it or bite into his fruit so that he might eat it. She refuses. Herod reproaches the bitter Herodias for the daughter she has raised. He offers Salomé her mother's seat.
Jokanaan announces that what he has foretold has come to pass. Herodias asks Herod to silence him: he is forever "vomiting insults" against her. She remarks that Herod most certainly fears him, for why else does he not deliver him to the Jews? Herod replies that he spares Jokanaan from delivery to the Jews since he is a holy man who has seen God. A Jew rejoins that no man has seen God since Elias. God has hidden himself, and thus evil has come upon the land. Another Jew notes that Elias saw but the shadow of God. Yet another insists that God shows himself in everything. Another attributes that belief to a dangerous Greek doctrine. A fifth insists that man cannot know how God works. A weary Herodias asks Herod to silent the group. Herod notes that some say Jokenaan is Elias.
Jokanaan announces the coming of the "Savior of the world." When Herod asks what he means, Tigellinus answers that Caesar takes the title. Herod protests that Caesar is not coming into Judea. As lord, he can do as he wishes but he is too gouty. A Nazarene declares that Jokanaan speaks of the Messiahs who work miracles. Herodias scoffs. The group reviews the miracles: the changing of water into wine, the healing of the lepers, his walk with the angels, the raising of the dead daughter of Jairus. Though he approves of the other works, Herod forbids Him from performing the last. Jokanaan curses the daughter of Babylon with "golden eyes" and "gilded eyelids," announcing her stoning, the piercing of her body with swords, its mashing under shields.
The primary action of the ensuing scene begins with the appearance of Herod and his court. First, however, the Page delivers a short eulogy by the Page the Syrian. His death is irrelevant to the drama of the figures that captured his gaze and "make" the play's spectacle, mourned only by the friend who warned him. The reader should linger on this parenthesis. The homoeroticism in their friendship is thinly veiled: the Syrian was the Page's "brother" and "nearer to [him] than a brother". In his memories, the Page's "seduction" in by the Syrian revolve around his voice—a "flute" that told him stories of his exotic land—and his gaze. Specifically this gaze was a narcissistic one: the Syrian loved to gaze at himself in the river, much to his friend's reproach. The Syrian's self-love seduces the Page, and thus the Page sets himself to adorning the Syrian with agate, earrings, and perfume. Soon thereafter, Herod will also underline how the Syrian is caught up in a system of looks, recalling how he was "fair to look upon"—we are surely in a universe of aesthetes here—and had "languorous eyes", eyes that perhaps looked too much at Salomé. Note again that it is not only the characters that are objects of the look here but their looks, as in they look, themselves. Finally, recall that the Syrian's death emerges not only from looking at Salomé, but from being looked at by the princess and moon. As the Page laments, he should have hidden him from the moon's deathly stare and removed him to a cavern out of sight.
Whatever his place under these gazes in life, in death the Syrian falls out of this system of looks altogether, becoming a tabooed object that must be removed from the royal stage. "I will not look on it" insists Herod. Though quickly removed, the Syrian leaves his trace on the palace grounds, the blood on which Herod slips. For Herod, his slip portents death, serving perhaps as the counterpart and another prefiguring of Salomé's dance of death. Visually, the Syrian's blood, the trace of his corpse, remains as a stain, a mark of death on the palace and its system of looks that the king cannot efface. With the removal of the Syrian's corpse, death only makes itself felt by other means. Herod complains of a wind and the sound of beating wings, sensing the invisible "angel of death" lurking behind them that Jokanaan heralds earlier. It is also of course in these scenes that Jokanaan foretells and demands Salomé's death under the shields, a prophecy Herodias mistakes as her own.
Please wait while we process your payment