Trust the "wooden O" to set the Shakespearean record straighter than usual. In John Dove's production, this is no problem play but a bright comedy where the immaculate plotting proves more admirable than its questionable characters. Its low cuddleability quotient will never make All's Well everyman's favourite; the heroine has Rosalind's or Viola's resourcefulness and none of their charm as she pursues a callow, snobbish young man whom you can't at first blame for feeling cornered but who ends up an irredeemable cad. The figure of fun despised by everyone else in the play, the mouthy Parolles, is the only chief candidate for our affections; so it was a foregone conclusion that the Globe actor with the best track record in energetic comedy, James Garnon, would steal the show.

The King James Bible, that great monument in the biography of the English language, is 400 years old this year. To use its own wording, it is as old as the hills, as old as Methuselah. Contemporaneous with Shakespeare, it has given us as many of the richly colourful phrases by which we still live: a nest of vipers, a thorn in the flesh, a fly in the ointment, a lamb to the slaughter, the skin of your teeth, in the twinkling of an eye. And so on and on. It was created, to quote it again, as a labour of love.

I defy anyone not to be excited at the prospect of a concert featuring such numbers as “Cuckolds All Awry”, “The Queen’s Dumpe”, “The Wooing of the Baker’s Daughter” and “Tickle My Toe”. Add to these tantalising scenarios early music’s favourite rebel Philip Pickett, and a guitarist who made it into Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 20 Greatest Guitarists of All Time chart, and you have yourself quite the unlikeliest of parties.

A genuine, if unanticipated, phenomenon has emerged over time at Shakespeare's Globe, the Bardic-themed playhouse that these days is full more often than not and with good reason, too. Time was when the canon's lesser-known offerings could be counted on to play to not much more than a devoted few. Well, no more.

“It isn’t a surprise to me, but it is a surprise to him that it isn’t a surprise to me.” On a Monday morning in the rehearsal room at Shakespeare’s Globe, actors and actresses are getting into character. “You’re acting panic,” clarifies the director, “and when you hear his voice it’s real panic.” Exactly how funny is The Merry Wives of Windsor in the 21st century?

Never have the Tudors seemed so real. After decades of TV and film characters keeping us at a teasing, ermined distance, Hilary Mantel's dazzling novel Wolf Hall brings it all to life as never before, and the Globe's still-running Henry VIII has vigorously built on that. But the Stuarts?

Political playwright Howard Brenton (b. 1942) is always in the process of being "rediscovered". Yet at the same time he has been at the heart of British theatrical life for the past 40 years, since his debut in 1969 with Christie in Love. True, he has spent the odd decade out of the theatrical limelight - a few years ago, he "went out of fashion" in his own phrase – and then he just happened to pen some of the liveliest scripts on television with the BBC’s spy drama series, Spooks (2002-2005).

Shakespeare’s two-part Henry IV cycle locks together the first modern plays in English. They strive for something quite new in drama, retaining a structural boldness and complexity seldom encountered in contemporary theatre. That's how "modern" they are (or seem). And in reiterating what others must have said oft and better, I intend no abutment on that deadly phrase “early modern” into which historians, and most annoyingly many literary critics, now incorporate the word “Renaissance” - which Henry IV of course also magnificently is.

Dominic Dromgoole (b. Oct.1963) had directed professionally precisely one Shakespeare play - Troilus and Cressida for the Oxford Stage Company, with a then little-known Matt Lucas as Thersites - when he was appointed artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, the Thames-side playhouse that has defied nay-sayers to become a London theatrical fixture since opening to the public in 1997. Could the amiably scruffy one-time leader of west London's tiny Bush, a space given over exclusively to new work, gather in the groundlings, and more, across a landscape inevitably defined by the Bard, notwithstanding the presence of original writing from Howard Brenton, Che Walker, or, still to come, Nell Leyshon? As Dromgoole's fifth season gathers pace with the opening 24 May of Henry VIII, directed by Mark Rosenblatt, it made sense to check in with Dromgoole early in his own rehearsals for Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2, with Roger Allam as Falstaff and Jamie Parker as Hal.