LAST WEEK saw a return to that most hoary of Shakespearean chestnuts, the “Whodunnit” controversy. Couldn’t be the Bard himself, oh no, that would be too obvious. Besides, he was just some Midlands scumbag. No, it had to be someone really fancy — Francis Bacon, the Earl of Oxford, Elizabeth I, or some sort of jobbing sub-committee featuring all three. Ignore the fact that Shakespeare’s modest background marked him out as precisely the sort of young buck who made it big on the Elizabethan literary scene. Ignore the fact, as evidenced in James Shapiro’s fascinating new study, 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, that evidence for his authorship is all about. Better rather to drum up some spooky, class-based mojo that takes our nation’s most distinguished literary figure and puts him back in his tawdry provincial box.

It is ironic that these most imaginative of critics cannot for a moment credit imagination on the part of the man who gave the world Hamlet, Falstaff and Lear. On the face of it, it is also ironic that this latest debunking should come from the Globe, that kitsch barnacle of Shakespeariana tucked under Blackfriars Bridge. Mark Rylance, the theatre’s outgoing artistic director, shows no compunction about biting the hand that has fed him and his company for the best part of a decade. For, in so gnawing, he can drum up a bit of publicity and plug the theatre’s forthcoming conference on these conspiracy theories (its second in as many years).

Rylance may enjoy taking a pop at Shakespeare, but he has done extremely well out of him during his stint at the Globe. Despite the theatre’s vaunting of its freelance casting director, Rylance has succeeded in securing many of the venue’s plum roles. Nor, indeed, is he above taking on the Shakespearean mantle where it can be used to gesture towards his own artistic status. This season, to mark his standing down as director, he plays Prospero, the part in which audiences have long understood the playwright’s own valediction to the stage to be expressed. It is an indulgence that other directors have allowed themselves (Peter Hall in his 1988 departure from the National, not least), but none who has left such a lamentable legacy.

For, as audiences at this season’s late plays will be able to judge, the house style that has evolved under Rylance’s aegis is as distinct as it is idiosyncratic. With a few notable exceptions, the policy appears to be to play unremittingly for gimmickry and laughs. The goal of accessibility has become confused with some sort of crass pantomime in which knowing winks and self-parody are substituted for poetry and pathos. Slapstick rules, in addition to buttock-clenching bits of business with the audience and a hearty hoofing it up at the play’s close.

This summer’s ghastly Pericles exemplifies this (non) aesthetic perfectly. The production is a relentless mishmash of accents and gross ethnic stereotypes; a self-indulgent shambles in which cartoon-style hamming is favoured over anything approaching more rounded performances. Thus Boult, the whoremonger’s servant, brandishes a bolt (phallic pun intended) every time his name is called. Thus an incestuous tyrant demonstrates his credentials as an incestuous tyrant by rhythmically grinding a grotesquely padded crotch.

The result is a (loosely) Shakespearean My Big Fat Greek Wedding, only considerably less tasteful. Indeed, so unremittingly does the production fall back upon a principle of larking about that, when presented with the prospect of a virgin being about to be raped by a blunt instrument, the audience falls about laughing — not edgy, uncomfortable laughter, but great guffaws of hilarity as the child-like victim cowers centre stage. Nowhere is there the redemptive quality that generations of readers and spectators have discovered in the late plays, merely irredeemable tomfoolery.

Indeed, the production, and the venue at large, wear their crassness on their sleeve. At one point, Patrice Naiambana, as Gower, takes one of several time-outs from the text to assert: “We don’t do art here. This is the Globe. We do life. If you want art go to a museum.” Later, the same actor apologises, leeringly unapologetically, for the play being “low-brow”. One does not have to be any sort of elitist to feel that the term fails to do justice to the performance’s depth of vulgarity.

And that’s another irony about the Globe: not only do its masters not believe in Shakespeare the man, they do not seem much interested in what he wrote. Whether in its gabbled mini Tempest or the direful Pericles, the text is disregarded for (admittedly impressive) acrobatics, or effusive, mid-action declarations that: “We want to make poverty history — yeah?” This leads us to the theatre’s utmost irony — that, by appearing to champion inclusivity, the Globe has become the ultimate exclusive venue: excluding Shakespeare as author, genuine Shakespeare enthusiasts, even the script, where it can. In striving to “bring people to Shakespeare”, the Globe is succeeding in pushing ever more of us away. Not that it ever has a problem with bums on (or off) seats. But, then, harnessing tourist traffic does not a compelling aesthetic vision make.

Next season brings a new artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole of the Oxford Stage Company, who has dismissed his predecessor’s claims about the authorship issue with an emphatic “Baloney”. Perhaps we can take this as an indication that he will follow a more discerning path — think outside the chocolate box, as it were. Rylance, though clearly a man of terrific energy and charisma, will, for all the wrong reasons, prove a difficult act to follow.

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