Diana Solomon, Theatre Historian

Diana Solomon is associate professor of Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature at Simon Fraser University. Her research and teaching interests include theatre and performance studies, comedy, women writers, and print culture. Her first book, Prologues and Epilogues of Restoration Theater: Gender and Comedy, Performance and Print, was published by Delaware in 2013, and came out in paperback in 2015. She is also the co-editor of Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice, and co-author, with the Multigraph Collective, and of Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation. She has published articles on Restoration actresses, closet drama, eighteenth- century audiences, mad songs, Don Quixote, anecdotes, and Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, and is currently at work on a book project about the eighteenth-century English theatre audience’s taste in comedy.

Ms. Solomon has published several Restoration and eighteenth-century theatre articles on subjects such as the play (possibly by Shakespeare) Double Falsehood; actresses Anne Bracegirdle and Anne Oldfield; the theatrical practice of ending tragedies with bawdy epilogues; “mad songs”; The London Merchant and theatre audiences; Margaret Cavendish’s comic prologues and epilogues; and the plays and theatrical compositions of Anne Finch. Current projects include editing The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century British Theatre, 2nd edition. With four colleagues from the SFU English department I have edited Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2014; paperback 2016). With scholars from McGill’s Interacting with Print consortium, I have written Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago, 2018).

Her second book project examines disruptive comedy on the Restoration and eighteenth-century British stage. Alongside the witty repartee of Restoration comedy and moral lessons of eighteenth-century theatre, comedy was thriving–and disrupting many elements of society. This book expands our knowledge of theatre range and audience taste by concentrating on disruptive comedy, from popular character types, to comic interruptions of tragedy, to sexual violence within comedies, to animal acts. The archival work for this book has been supported by fellowships from the Clark Library, the Huntington Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.