Golden jubilee of the bard's May night

On a Friday night in May, when an audience of mostly young people are watching Shylock and Portia argue onstage in a scene from The Merchant of Venice, Liu Haiping, 70, keeps glancing at a handwritten speech he is holding.

He looks nervous as he waits for the play to end so that he can address the crowd.

Liu, an English professor from Nanjing University in Jiangsu province, is emotional during his address. He recalls how, 50 years ago, he and other members of an amateur troupe from the university had performed scenes from Hamlet, King Lear, Julius Caesar, and The Merchant of Venice, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's birth.