When Zhang Dongyu’s charismatic Richard III rose from the dead to take his bows for Sunday’s spellbinding afternoon performance by the National Theatre of China, the actor paused, remaining on his knees to kiss the stage of the Globe. It was a gesture both charming and wildly popular with the sodden but appreciative audience, affirming that, for the guest artists from afar, bringing their interpretations of the Bard to the Thames-side temple is a very big thrill and emotional experience.

The rain it raineth every day this week, sometimes with monsoon-like persistence. Yet there’s no dousing the ardour of groundlings and thespian visitors to the global Shakespeare village within the wooden O. Comic exuberance reaches a sophisticated high watermark here with the Company Theatre of Mumbai unfurling Twelfth Night as a Hindi musical.

Something extraordinary is happening at Shakespeare’s Globe. However unlikely the appeal, audiences are flocking to every one of Globe to Globe’s visiting productions. But sometimes logic surely cannot be defied. A full house for Pericles, and an ecstatic ovation?

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, his reprise of Falstaffian humour to please Queen Bess is surely the most specific in its prosaic gallimaufry of earthy English vocabulary. Yet it’s also the most universal in its target-practice at the lecherous, traditionally overbuilt gentleman-hero.

So, what's the "problem"? All is right with the world - or the theatre at least - in the Maori-language staging of Troilus and Cressida from the Auckland-based Ngakau Toa troupe that pierces right to the troubling heart of this first of Shakespeare's three so-called "problem plays".

"Shakespeare’s Coming Home," boasts the strapline of a highly ambitious strand of London 2012’s Cultural Olympiad. Between now and 9 June, 37 productions of the complete canon by Shakespeare (with apologies to Two Noble Kinsmen fans) will be seen at Shakespeare’s Globe by 37 different theatre companies from all over the world. Hence the catchy title, Globe to Globe, which forms only a part of a World Shakespeare Festival continuing until September and taking place all over England and Wales, from Stratford-upon-Avon to the National Eisteddfod.

Better late than never. It took till Act 3 for a new Juliet to fledge her wings and shed the nervous caution, but Melissa Hamilton, debuting yesterday afternoon in probably the Royal Ballet’s most coveted ballerina role, suddenly did what we all knew she could, and after a subdued first act seized the drama and the story. And, in Romeo’s phrase, light broke - the sun in the east. A fair new Juliet.

Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death is the misleading, jokey title of a play about Shakespeare in his ignoble last years, unable to write further, isolated from his beloved London, and hemmed in by local politics. Shakespeare is invited to become a town councillor! To take sides in a dispute about land enclosures! It’s a cracking re-visioning of the genius whom films and myth have preserved in the aspic of lusty, piratic eloquence.

Four people walked out of Filter’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream last night. The rest stayed to cheer an hour and 20 minutes of fast and furious filleted Shakespeare from a company which has made its name merging visual and musical forms, reinventing classics and creating new devised pieces.

It's one of the fundamental rules of concert-going that in any given season there will be one piece that trips you up. And that piece will always be by Berlioz. No matter what new alchemical concoctions Boulez, Lachenmann, Ferneyhough or Rihm will throw at you, someone will programme something by the 19th-century French composer - usually something with a perfectly benign-sounding title like King Lear Overture or Roméo et Juliette - that will in fact sound more modern, more outlandish, more baffling than anything written before or since.