The Taming of the Shrew in Chinese Higher Education: Female Speech, Public Traces of Rehearsal, and Institutional Hesitation

This article argues that Chinese higher-education institutions do not simply stage The Taming of the Shrew; they mediate it through the official public texts that frame rehearsal and performance. Drawing on six official public-facing texts linked to productions at Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai University, Southern University of Science and Technology, and the Central Academy of Drama, we analyse festival reports, lecture announcements, preview reports, production summaries, adaptation framing, and post-show explanation as public traces of rehearsal: institutional interfaces that render theatrical process publicly legible without offering transparent access to it. Across these cases, Shrew is repeatedly reorganised around female speech, wedding spectacle, domestic discipline, and the afterlife of Katherina’s final speech. We argue that these materials reveal a recurring pattern of institutional hesitation: a rhetoric that preserves Shakespearean prestige while qualifying, delaying, or estranging comic closure through euphemism, expert mediation, tragic-satiric reframing, and strategic disavowal. Read this way, Chinese higher-education Shrews emerge as sites where performance criticism, public pedagogy, and Asian Shakespeare converge.