The Shakespeare Institute Players perform Tang Xianzu’s masterpiece in Tang Xianzu’s home city

The University of Birmingham has welcomed Chinese students and taken a strong interest in Chinese history and culture ever since its foundation in 1900. Its chief founder, Joseph Chamberlain, was passionately devoted to Shakespeare. He had already co-founded Birmingham’s Shakespeare Memorial Library, and made the university’s long-term commitment to Shakespearean study clear when a statue of the playwright was placed centrally above the main door of the Aston Webb building in 1907. These two interests were powerfully combined when the University of Birmingham's Shakespeare Institute – the Stratford-based global hub of Shakespeare studies, established in 1951 – teamed up with Nanjing University and Yilin Press to inaugurate the Shakespeare Centre, China in 2016.

Thanks to the networks established by the Shakespeare Centre, China, the Institute was visited in November 2024 by Professor Huang Bikang of Peking University. Professor Bikang is a leading Shakespearean scholar who has translated some of the work of Shakespeare’s Chinese contemporary Tang Xianzu into English blank verse. During his visit, members of the Institute’s student dramatic society staged a rehearsed reading of extracts from his translation of Tang’s masterpiece The Peony Pavilion.

News of this event reached Tang’s birthplace, Fuzhou, in Jiangxi Province. The governor has now generously invited the Shakespeare Institute Players to perform their English version of The Peony Pavilion as part of the city’s international theatre festival in late October. Extracts from a Shakespeare Institute Players production of The Tempest were seen by an estimated 80 million Chinese television viewers in 2012 – when the celebrity interviewer Luyu filmed part of the London Olympics special edition of her chat show A Date with Luyu in Stratford-upon-Avon. This will be the first time Institute students have performed in China. PhD student Emily C. A. Snyder’s production of The Peony Pavilion, moreover, will be seen not just in Fuzhou but in Beijing, on the campus of Peking University, as part of a double bill with an experimental Chinese performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Panel discussions and talks on intercultural theatre will accompany the performances in both cities.

This short Chinese tour by the Shakespeare Institute Players marks not just a milestone in the cross-border understanding of Chinese and English sixteenth-century drama, but a remarkable instance of cultural diplomacy. At the instigation of Governor Wan, the Players have sent a letter about their visit to President Xi Jinping, himself a knowledgeable reader of Shakespeare. His anticipated reply will be read out during the spectacular opening ceremony of the theatre festival in Fuzhou. Student dramatic societies rarely get to correspond with major world leaders; ours – now widely recognised as the prime destination for scholars interested in the Chinese reception of Shakespeare - is truly a university which provides its postgraduate students with very special opportunities.