Diamonds one day, stones the next: compulsive giver Timon’s swift descent into raving misanthropy would be better packed into a gritty pop ballad than a full-length play. Still, Shakespeare just about pulls it off: having had more of a hindering than a helping hand from Thomas Middleton in early scenes, he comes into his own with howling, Lear-like invective.

Now here's a surprise. In English, Henry VIII gets dismissed as a Shakespearean dud (well, let's apportion the blame as well to the play's generally acknowledged co-author, John Fletcher), its karma not exactly enhanced by one's awareness that this was the play that was being performed when the original Globe burned down in June, 1613. Happily, the only fire in evidence in the Globe to Globe's contribution from Spain was that communicated by its brio-filled, impassioned cast, for whom a potential theatrical pageant fairly pulsated with life. 

The battle of the sexes took on a bright and breezy tone in Pakistan's contribution to the Globe's ongoing Bardathon, the Theatre Wallay-Kashf's rumbustious production of The Taming of the Shrew. It's been more customary of late to treat this most vexatious of comedies as sustainedly ironic or as a far-from-funny exercise in domestic degradation. But the director Hassaim Hussain and his agile company were having none of that. If anything their production in its tone often suggested a dry run for The Comedy of Errors, which the Globe will host later this week.

The Winter’s Tale may not be one of the best loved of Shakespeare’s plays – not quite a comedy, not quite a full-blown drama – but the Globe was packed on the hottest night of the year for this vibrant Yoruba version direct from Lagos. South-East London has the largest Yoruba population outside Nigeria. The audience was maybe 40 per cent Yoruba-speaking (my daughter thought 70 per cent), and their gusts of laughter and murmurs of affirmation set the tone for the rest of the crowd’s responses.

It's both easy and fashionable to render ironic, or scoff at, the title of All's Well That Ends Well. This is the Shakespeare "comedy" in which the rabidly obsessed Helena finally ensnares her none-too-doting Bertram in a putative happy ending that tends to be played as if the pair are advancing toward the gallows. But it's in the way of Shakespeare's Globe in general and the miraculous Globe to Globe season in particular that, as served up by the Arpana theatre company from Mumbai, one of the Bard's three problem plays emerges as both jubilant and touching.

Had one listened to the Chiten company from Kyoto performing Coriolanus with one’s eyes closed, it would have seemed as if the stage were teeming with performers. And without understanding a word of Japanese, a theatregoer could respond to the gamut of moods and rhetoric of the play, from mob fury met with autocratic disdain to political conniving and on to maternal grief and horror: all were audibly evident in a collective tour de force of verbal dexterity, range and expression.

The Globe to Globe season has enjoyed tremendous goodwill from audiences and critics alike. And this has been largely repaid, for it’s been a joy and a wonder to learn just how much contemporary relevance can be mined and brought into sharp relief, and with such audacious wit, when stripped of the plays’ native tongue. So one wishes one could keep up the momentum of goodwill for every production.

Like a post-Soviet Oedipal X-Factor, the Belarus Free Theatre on Friday night gave one of the greatest productions of King Lear London has ever seen. Forget our local Lears, with naked theatrical knights and casts in emotional straitjackets: this was as cruel, as beautiful, as you could want. It shook the Globe from the yard to the rafters.

You might have wondered if, when Armenia was offered King John as part of the Globe to Globe season, they felt they’d drawn the short straw. Not a bit of it. Shakespeare’s early history play, the action of which pre-dates those for which he is better known by a century, may be rarely performed, but here, in what I suspect is a judiciously trimmed version, it brings out so much that genuinely crosses international lines, speaking Shakespeare’s story with the local accent of the producing nation.