Shakespeare – don't you just love him? Judging by the total attendance figure for the recent Globe to Globe season, many of us do, myself included: 85,000 tickets were sold, demonstrating that in whatever language they are performed, our craving for his plays is undiminished.

Shakespeare is everywhere this summer – on TV, on show at the British Museum, celebrated in a vast World Shakespeare festival. The official guide for the London 2012 festival lists 62 Shakespeare productions, and only 55 non-Shakespeare theatre and performance events. We have an entire company devoted to his work: the RSC, subsidised to the tune of £16m per year. Nor is it just this summer that Shakespeare dominates: he is a staple in the repertoires of many subsidised theatres.

Some years ago, the director Matthew Warchus suggested it was time to have a moratorium on Shakespeare, arguing it would give us an opportunity to rethink why and how we want to stage the plays, rather than just churning them out.

I wouldn't go that far. As Globe to Globe proved, there is a huge appetite for Shakespeare; it would be absurd and counter-productive to deny this. Preventing a younger generation from enjoying their first King Lear or Hamlet amounts to cultural vandalism.

But it's hard to dispute the fact that the dominance of Shakespeare does crowd out new writing and other forms of theatre in Britain. So what to do? My suggestion is not that we should stop producing Shakespeare, but that we should have a brief – perhaps two-year – moratorium on funding his work. Theatres can produce Shakespeare if they want; but they can't spend their subsidy on it.

Shakespeare is the most subsidised playwright in the world, but as non-subsidised outfits such as the Globe and all this summer's pop-up shows prove, he can survive very well on his own. A breathing space would allow theatres to spend their money in other ways; the RSC and others could concentrate on supporting the future and not just the past. Who knows? We might even produce the next Shakespeare.