also widely known, as can be seen in the reference to it in Thomas Otway's comedy The Soldier's Fortune (1681), where a character says: "Be sure they be lewd, drunken, stripping whores". Striptease became standard fare in the brothels of 18th century London, where the women, called "posture girls", would strip naked on tables for popular entertainment. Striptease was also combined with music, as in the 1720 German translation of the French La Guerre D'Espagne (Cologne: Pierre Marteau, 1707), where a galant party of high aristocrats and opera singers entertain themselves with hunting, play and music in a three-day turn at a small château: The dancers, to please their lovers the more, dropped their clothes and danced totally naked the nicest entrées and ballets; one of the princes directed the delightful music, and only the lovers were allowed to watch the performances. An Arabic custom, first noted by French colonialists and described by the French novelist Gustave Flaubert may have influenced the French striptease. The dances of the Ghawazee in North Africa and Egypt consisted of the erotic dance of the bee performed by a woman known as Kuchuk Hanem. In this dance, the performer disrobes as she searches for an imaginary bee trapped within her garments. It is likely that the women performing these dances did not do so in an indigenous context, but rather, in response to the demand for this type of entertainment. Middle Eastern belly dance, also known as oriental dancing, was popularized in the United States after its introduction on the Midway at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago by a dancer known as Little Egypt. Some claim the origin of the modern striptease lies in Oscar Wilde's play Salome (play), in 1893. In the Dance of the Seven Veils, the female protagonist dances for King Herod and slowly removes her veils until she lies naked. After Wilde's play and Richard Strauss's operatic version of the same, first performed in 1905, the erotic "dance of the seven veils" became a standard routine for dancers in opera, vaudeville, film and burlesque. A famous early practitioner was Maud Allan, who in 1907 gave a private performance for King Edward VII. French tradition In the 1880s and 1890s, Parisian shows such as the Moulin Rouge and Folies Bergère were featuring attractive scantily clad women dancing and tableaux vivants. In this environment, an act in the 1890s featured a