It's an unprecedented and ambitious programme which has attracted big hitters like Patrick Stewart (The Tempest and Antony and Cleopatra), Dame Judi Dench (a musical Merry Wives of Windsor) and Sir Ian McKellen (King Lear) back to Warwickshire, along with visiting companies from both south and north America, the Middle East, Asia, Africa and right across Europe.
It's the theatrical equivalent of an Olympic bid - two new temporary theatres, most impressively the 1,000-seat Courtyard, will take the audience capacity up to 2,800 a night and the action will be traced out not just down by the river but across the town.
There are 15 homegrown RSC productions currently in rehearsals, and also a South African Hamlet, the bloodiest Titus Andronicus on record courtesy of acclaimed Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa, a Belgian take on Othello and an anglo-Kuwati angle on Richard III, focussing on 'Saddam Hussein's early days as a secular Arab hero before he murdered his way through the Ba'ath party'.
Not to mention the Cardboard Citizens homeless theatre company's 'management training' version of Timon of Athens.
Then there's the Sri-Lankan-influenced 'supernatural' Midsummer Night's Dream, and the community work and discussion groups which will be the £3.6 million project's legacy along with a new RSC-approved complete works volume.
It's a massive undertaking, and on Monday it had left festival director Deborah Shaw - the former Kenilworth School girl charged with bringing it all together by April 12 - clinging with humour to the maxim "chaos in the centre is what the arts are all about".
She said: "It was all (RSC artistic director) Michael Boyd's mad idea and I came in when it was all decided. I had the easy bit - all the organising! Then, of course, we spent four months arguing about it.
"It's a big idea, but it has to have real substance or we'd get found out very quickly. It's basically been a terrifying multi-headed monster - a past, present and future of the RSC - and in the absence of Glastonbury this year it's the biggest festival around.
"A few months ago when we launched the first booking period I was feeling the pressure. Now I'm just enjoying the journey - it's acquired its own momentum and it's all much more important than me.
"There are 53 projects in total and I'm talking to artists from Rio to Alaska. Their takes on the stories have been fascinating; these were written 400 years ago and now they're bringing them back to us, in Stratford, often as foreign language translations.
"That's been particularly interesting - some are completely faithful to the poetry, others show a degree of invention which a British company might not have felt able to do. I can certainly promise a few surprises, a journey through the whole landscape of modern Shakespeare and its relevance around the globe."
It is this cross-cultural dialogue which Shaw is most proud of - weird, wonderful, sometimes just plain strange. And it's exactly the type of innovation she was forced into by limited budgets in her previous job with the Bath Festival, which "got her the gig" in 2003.
She added: "Its such a delicious opportunity. Both to do what we want to do and to set up a bond with the rest of the world, explore the resonance of Shakespeare to other cultural traditions.
"As an example, Richard III as seen by Shakespeare and the issues of politics, censorship and finding a place in the modern world it provokes for Sulayman Al-Bassan are really quite different. Perhaps, for us we might have seen it differently in Elizabethan times, but the modern history has given it an edge for that cultural background.
"There have been lots of long meetings drinking expresso in cafes on that one, and plenty of long e-mails when he's been back in Kuwait.
"About 15 years ago a lot of eastern Europeans were doing Hamlet, because it really spoke to them; the new emerging order and the political tumult.
"This time we will have a more joyous, almost mystery-story version, reflecting the rainbow culture of a new South Africa. I first saw that production in Cape Town amongst 500 or so whooping and gasping kids - the first post-Apartheid generation to have grown up together. And it made me cry - that will be tremendously powerful."
On the outer edges of this new extended RSC family are Poland's Song of the Goat, a company who take a minimum of two years to rehearse a play, are fascinated by European folk traditions and equally likely to be found enjoying a little polyphonic singing on the Albanian border as fine-tuning the Bard's best.
Shaw added: "We ring them up and say 'can you perform on such and such a day', but the rehearsal period is so long they just say 'maybe yes...maybe no'.
"They're doing Macbeth, it could be like pretty much anything and I can't wait."
Booking for the first half of the Complete Works, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, Antony and Cleopatra, Cymbeline, Hamlet, Henry IV, Henry VI, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John and Love's Labour's Lost has already begun. Call 0870 609 1110 or visit www.rsc.org.uk
Booking for performances between November 2006 and April 2007 opens next month.
* Pressure? What pressure!: Complete Works director Deborah Shaw.