From previous, shorter visits, I was already familiar with the way plays in proximity start talking to one another, seeming to raise common themes and bat about their differences. I had also seen how actors, switching among multiple roles each week, inevitably brought bits of each with them: a perfume of Prospero, an aura of Miss Adelaide.

But when you spend more time at the festival, and five or six hours a day in dark theaters, something else happens: The dark starts to leak. Not only do you see the plays’ characters everywhere, but you also feel the world taking up the threats and questions of the works.

For me, that’s the joy of Stratford, the largest repertory company in North America, now in its 67th season. Even if the individual productions are often B-plus efforts — rarely as good as the best versions you’ve ever seen but almost always among the better — the variety and cleverness of the programming more than make up for it. Under the artistic directorship of Antoni Cimolino, the mix of Shakespeare, classics, musicals and new work demonstrates the continuity of theater through the ages, as well as the continuity of injustice that makes it necessary.

Not that you’d guess this from the season’s official theme: Breaking Boundaries, an upbeat phrase that could be applied to almost any play ever. No matter; the real theme, the result of Mr. Cimolino’s pairings and groupings and casting, is considerably darker and more specific. Catch “Othello,” “Merry Wives,” “Little Shop,” “Private Lives” and “Henry VIII” — as well as a new play, “Mother’s Daughter” — and you cannot miss it: the paranoid need of men to regulate women’s sexuality, as a source of both pleasure and progeny.