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.
In Titus Andronicus (4.2.177-182), Aaron, seeking to save his infant son, imagines a fantasy of shared human-animal nurturance by invoking a she-goat as nurse. The goat nursing a human child replicates various mythological precedents, which play into the early modern masculine myth of self-sufficient nurture independent of a threatening impact of human mothers. These narratives fashion superhuman masculinity fostered through animal-exclusive nurture. However, stories of animals nursing humans in early modern midwifery books often signal a threat of contamination, a terrifying blurring of lines between humans and animals. Aaron's nurturance fantasy is imbued with various, often conflicting, meanings that spill into our modern ways of interpreting the 'whiteness' of milk. Because Aaron's son, born of miscegenation, already embodies anxieties about blurred human and non-human boundaries, mammalian lactation fluid engenders another level of the racialised politics of more-than-human milk. This paper has two aims: first, from a presentist perspective, to centre maternal mammals like the goat in Titus Andronicus in order to reflect on modern mammalian motherhood; and second, to examine the cultural significance of milk in early modern England, highlighting the intersecting logics of misogyny, racism, and speciesism and their persistence into modernity.
