Every story has a beginning a middle and an end. This chestnut is so ingrained into our psyche and from such an early age that we might wonder if it’s included with eyes, legs, arms and the rest under ‘stuff we’re born with’. Long before we learned how to write things down homo sapiens were telling stories through pictures and sounds to teach survival and morality.

The Odyssey is nearly 3,000 years old and yet still speaks to us as though very little has changed. If you’re wondering why this three-hours long film is proving such a hit among the attention-deprived smartphone scrolling public, the answer is that the odyssey is a journey we all take, one we’re all familiar with, a story of who we are now, where we’ve come from, and where we’re looking to go. It also gives them a new classic heroic story to tell their friends – "I’ve just spent three hours in the cinema and I didn’t look at my phone once!"

In this episode I spend a little bit of time looking at Shakespeare's own journey from Stratford to showbiz, although we know almost nothing about the first few years.

It makes more sense to look at the effect the Odyssey itself had on Shakespeare, and how he used the various stories of Homer and Ovid within his own plays. There's Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra, who so beguiles the Roman Emperor that he'd rather hang out with her in Egypt than attend to his duties in Rome. I mean, wouldn't you do the same? I'm sure he was treated with great reverence in Rome but wouldn't you rahter be hanging out in Egypt with a fellow ruler, pretending you're conducting great affairs of state when really all you're conductin is affairs?

Then there's Titus Andronicus (look away now squeamish people), Troilus and Cressida, and of course The Tempest. Yes I always seem to come back to The Tempest don't I. Hard to avoid that play in this case, shipwrecks landing on desert island are all the rage in The Odyssey.

There's also my own personal journey story related to that play - in my valiant battle with Chiltern Railways, did I get to see it on time or had I upset the Gods of train travel so much that they conspired to keep me away? All is revealed at the end of the episode.

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Or as King Lear might have said to you at the time if you'd been standing next to him at the bus stop "Awful weather for the time of year wouldn't you say?" Why are we Brits so obsessed with the weather? Partly because of where we sit on the planet combined with our islands status, it makes us the receptacle of an awful loot of unpredicatable weather.

And it was even more the case in Shakespeare's time. The elements played a much bigger part in our lives than they do at the moment, current heatwaves excepted. In a couple of the plays the tone is set by the opening lines - 'Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York,' Richard the Third says at the start of that play. While Macbeth begins famously with the three witches, the first asking "When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning or in rain?"

Shakespeare often uses the weather to evoke a sense of personality - think of the stormy nature of Lear, the man and the play, or the dark and broodiness that hangs over the whole of Macbeth.

As I often say, Shakespeare isn't so much a man with the answers as someone who knows how to ask the right questions, and he makes us think about how whatever kind of person we are, however much we think we can control events, nature has much greater control than any single individual. Even in a play like The Tempest, where Prospero invents a storm - he literally makes the weather - he can't change people.

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"With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come. And let my liver rather heat with wine, than my heart cool with mortifying groans."

In the second part of this conversation with my former Sitcom Geeks co-host James Cary (pictured) we talk about how it's possible to use humour to explore the most difficult subjects. James is one of the most successful audience sitcom writers in the UK, having worked on a host of TV and radio audience shows including Miranda, My Hero, Think The Unthinkable and My Family. Together we nerded out for 222 episodes about all matters sitcom.

James's own sitcom Bluestone 42 ran on the BBC for three seasons, and was set among a bomb disposal unit in Afghanistan. Really you can't get much darker than that can you? Well you can, and another hit show that James worked on Miranda, did just that.

Miranda was a massive hit show and had a deceptive lightness of touch that allowed Miranda Hart and the writers to explore the darkest aspects of what it means to be a single woman in her 30s and all the pressures she is under to get married, have children and have a good job. We talk about the many examplesin Shakespeare where the subjects of life and death are as likely to be explored in the tragedies as they are in the comedies.

Since becoming obsessed with Shakespeare I have come to understand how so much of the audience TV show, my favourite form of comedy, owes its debt directly to the plays of Shakespeare. I thought I might struggle to persuade James of this latest theory but it turns out that he has his own favourite Shakespeare obsessions as well.

In the first part of the interview, we talked about what an audience sitcom is and how it sits as a direct descendant of the old English music hall and the plays of Shakespeare. In this week's episode we talk about comedy and religion, funny characters and the parallels between Shakespeare characters abndsitcom greats.

To find out more about what James is currently up to checkout his website jamescary.com

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Once upon a time there was a bad man who ruled the kingdom, and the people were unhappy. Just when everything seemed lost a knight in shining armour arrived, the kingdom was saved and we all lived… well most of us did. Who is this mysterious new character in our lives? What are the chances that in the wake of his arrival, we all live happily ever after? Are we possibly getting a bit old to believe fairy stories?

In this week's episode I look at one of the oldest fairy tales in English folklore, that first found its way into the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, recorded almost a thousand years ago. In a previous episode I talked about the ways in which we become disappointed very quickly with our new leaders, today we're taking a step further back as we investigate what happens in the build up to getting rid of the bad guy and replacing them with the knight in shining armour.

The reason these stories remain so popular is because they still resonate for us in the 21st century, It’s not difficult to see ourselves in each of the main characters in this story. You and I and almost everyone is the poor beautiful young princess, yes even me, a 67-year-old white bloke with hairy legs and an occasional weight problem.

The bad ruler, or ugly sister, or wicked stepmother represents a person we know who seems to have too much control over our lives. The knight in shining armour, in the fantasy that is this story, is the handsome young Amazon driver, here to deliver that control back to us.

Yes it’s a story, as believable as the fairies at the bottom of the garden who tell it. In reality more often than not it’s the lesser evil who still controls our lives but in a slightly less controlling way.

There are many ways in which Shakespeare approaches the story - there's the person who thinks they're the knight when they're clearly knot (sorry), sometimes there's more than one knight battling for the honour of the title, sometimes we just like the idea of a knight, other times there really is a knight but they don't win, and then there's the world where there's no such thing.

Is it all a bunch of fairy stories, a waste of time? Well, occasionally we really do all live happily ever after.

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In this episode I talk to my former Sitcom Geeks co-host James Cary. James is one of the most successful audience sitcom writers in the UK, having worked on a host of TV and radio audience shows including Miranda, My Hero, Think The Unthinkable and My Family. His own show Bluestone 42 ran for three series on the BBC. Together we nerded out for 222 episodes about all matters sitcom.

We stopped making the show in 2023, in the time since I've become obsessed with Shakespeare, but have also come to understand how so much of the audience TV show, my favourite form of comedy, owes its debt directly to the plays of Shakespeare. I thought I might struggle to persuade James of this latest theory but it turns out that he has his own favourite Shakespeare obsessions as well.

In this, the first part of the interview, we talk about what an audience sitcom is and how it sits as a direct descendant of the old English music hall and the plays of Shakespeare. We talk about what we love about audience sitcom ("I like laughing" is James's excellent answer to the question), and how this relates to some of the best aspects of Shakespeare - including the feeling engendered by being in the room when the show is happening.

We discuss how flawed characters are at the heart of the best sitcoms, and talk of how this is also true in a lot of Shakespeare.

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Why is there so much rage in the world? Since I started making this podcast I have forced myself back to social media, in case you’re wondering why I reached that earth shattering conclusion. I left because I’d been wondering why my mental health seemed to have been deteriorating slightly and as soon as I stopped, it got better. Simplest experiment ever undertaken.

Anyway I came back to facebook because they have millions of fans following several Shakespeare pages and I thought ‘these are my people’, not realising that I’d still be getting the feed from friends I used to follow three years ago. And you know what? They’re still posting exactly the same enraging stuff they were posting back then.

Every now and then some new invention comes along that brings deep disorder to the world. It took around 10 years for the iPhone to revolutionise our lives, and turn us all into a giant universe of hunched miniature screen starers. Things moved a little slower in Shakespeare’s time but around a hundred years after Johannes Gutenberg had invented the printing press in 1440 it began to disrupt… well, everything. Like Steve Jobs the man was revered and reviled in equal measure.

There was no shortage of rage in Shakespeare’s time. And boy did that man know how to write it in a scene.

In this episode I look at the many aspects of rage and how Shakespeare shows it in the plays. There’s the performative rage of Henry V, proving that rage isn’t necessarily a moment of spontaneous fury, you can learn to switch it on in a moment. There’s nothing performative about Coriolanus. This man is a simmering cauldron of indignation, but it’s okay because that’s exactly what is needed for his chosen profession of soldier. His character trait that’s perfectly admirable in war isn’t quite such an asset in a politician.

But this episode isn’t all about kings and leaders. What about us. Like Coriolanus, we learn a lot about who we become from the actions of our parents.

There are many more ways in which rage can be triggered. So many possibilities out there. Whatever flips your switch, it’s almost always something that is caused by factors over which you no longer have any control. Or maybe you always had control and never realised until you lost it, possibly on account of your own stupid actions, you damn fool.

That’s you, King Lear, and also, if I admit it, me too. How? Listen on…

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Today’s episode is all about sleep.

Did you know that we’re currently going through a global sleep crisis. Up to 30% of the adult population in developed nations live with sleep disorders and chronic insomnia. And it isn’t all book writers lying awake while ruminating over the poor sales of their how to sleep books in an overcrowded market.

Why is it happening? We’ve got a pretty good idea. Those darn screens.

To break the cycle of sleep deprivation, experts recommend establishing a strict wind-down routine: Stop using phones and laptops at least an hour before bed.

Yeah right. Don’t you realise we’re only scrolling down those screens to avoid having to deal with all those anxieties in our lives that’ll only surface when we put those phones down and try and get some sleep!

I’m not saying Shakespeare has the answers, I never do, he’s not a philosopher or a self-help guru, he’s not wearing a white lab coat or running a wellness clinic, he’s a writer who spent his life interrogating everything around what it means to be a human being. And since like every other person before or since he spent around a third of his entire life asleep, it’s not surprising that he devoted a huge amount of time investigating what’s happening to us during our non-waking hours.

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In this episode I suggest if you could define Shakespeare in one word that word might possibly be – stoic.

I think the philosophy comes closest to what guides the plays is because of the most famous phrase associated with stoicism – memento mori: remember you must die.

At this point I make a joke about memento mori that’s my favourite in the entire 17 episodes to date, which probably means no one else will like it. Anyway it comes around four and a half minutes in so you decide.

There are four main strands of stoicism, Number one: Wisdom.

There’s no shortage of characters in Shakespeare for whom wisdom is the best definition. People, often women, whose lives are shaped by the actions of others, but who admit the reality of the choices they have to make. Accepting life as it is, rather than how they might want it to be.

These are not the big beasts, the flawed characters who lend their names to the titles of the play. They tend to be the people who hold up a mirror to those egotistical heavyweights and show them the error of their ways. For every self-obsessed Lear there’s a generous Cordelia, every scheming Macbeth has a well-adjusted Banquo and every jealous Othello has a trusting Desdemona.

Number two: Justice.

In this section I talk about a man I’ve barely mentioned, if at all, up until now – Fortinbras Probably one of the least known but most stoic characters in the whole of Hamlet.

Like Hamlet, he wants to avenge the death of his father. Who was killed, as bad luck would have it, by Hamlet’s father. But that was in good old-fashioned honest combat. Not like Hamlet’s, poisoned by his own brother, who then went on to marry his own mum. No wonder Hamlet’s struggling to make sense of his own future.

He’s a man of action, unlike Hamlet who is a man of thoughts.

So far it’s been all about supporting actors. Why are some of the best known stoics merely footnotes in the great works?

Part of the answer comes with virtue number three – courage.

Courage is often about standing up to authority. And here’s a thing you may have noticed, authority, what we might call a king for example, doesn’t like it when someone stands up to them.

Stoics focus on performing the task right in front of them to the best of their ability, rather than fretting about what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow. Antony, at the funeral of Julius Caesar. Isabella in Measure for Measure, who has to find a way to save her own brother without having to sleep with the corrupt deputy leader Angelo.

Number Four – Temperance.

Prospero, in the Tempest, is an old man who has come to understand the rewards of patience.  In practical terms, we’re talking about self-restraint, modesty and propriety.

He’s found the right moment to bring together his old enemies and loyal friends, they arrive shipwrecked on his island, where he practises his magic. He’s seeking vengeance for the evil done to him by King Alonso and his brother Antonio. 12 years he has waited for this moment

Prospero has shown great patience here, but what’s he going to gain from all this. What about courage? And wisdom?

Now that I’ve got you here, Prospero says, d’you know what, I forgive you all.

Spoken like a true stoic. He knows he hasn’t got long to live, and this is going to be how he will be remembered. Memento mori.

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Top podcaster Tim McIntosh, host of The Play's The Thing, talks about how we can all learn to love Shakespeare, especially after bad experiences at school. We both admit we initially found Shakespeare dull and inaccessible when taught as literature in classrooms. Our lightbulb moments came through performance. Tim says watching film versions such as Hamlet and Othello first showed him Shakespeare’s energy, but acting scenes himself truly transformed his understanding. Memorising and physically performing the lines made the text come alive in a way silent reading never had.

Tim believes that Shakespeare is often taught incorrectly. He argues teachers approach the plays as if they were novels rather than scripts meant for actors and audiences. Instead of students sitting silently analysing text, Tim believes they should be on their feet, speaking the lines, reacting to each other, and treating Shakespeare as active theatre. Try it yourself! Do it with a friend!

Tim describes several practical techniques he uses in teaching. One of his most effective exercises removes students’ fear of embarrassment: he asks everyone to perform lines “as badly as possible.” Students mumble, overact, shout, and exaggerate deliberately. By the fourth repetition they have already absorbed the text and become less self-conscious, making real performance much easier. This creates a classroom “culture of performance” where everyone participates together rather than worrying about looking foolish.

Another important aspect of his teaching is blocking — the physical positioning and movement of actors on stage. Tim explains that the distance between characters fundamentally changes the emotional meaning of a scene. Two people shouting from opposite sides of a room create a completely different atmosphere from two people speaking quietly shoulder to shoulder. He wants students to experience Shakespeare physically, not just intellectually.

I always try and keep out of the 21st century but here we are discussing a scene that's like the start of so many rom coms, here's another scene that could have been lifted directly to be the plot for Indecent Proposal. Tim argues Shakespeare originally belonged to lively, unruly popular entertainment rather than the “gilded” reverence surrounding it today. Audiences at the Shakespeare's Globe were active participants, much like modern comedy crowds.

This chat reminded me of the effect real proper acting had on me when I had to'do' anger. Tim shows how so many scenes highlight Shakespeare’s fascination with conflicting value systems, power, honour, ambition, and human weakness.

By the end, Tim’s core message is clear: Shakespeare becomes meaningful when treated as living drama rather than sacred literature. If people simply try performing the plays aloud with others, he believes “they’ll fall in love — there’s nothing they can do about it.”

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Shakespeare understood the irrational nature of love centuries before modern neuroscience explained it. Using examples from Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, and As You Like It, we see how falling in love makes people behave foolishly because powerful brain chemicals temporarily override logic and self-control.

Romeo’s sudden switch from obsessing over Rosaline to worshipping Juliet demonstrates how attraction can shut down rational thinking. Modern neuroscience explains this through surges of dopamine, norepinephrine, and reduced serotonin, creating obsession, euphoria, impulsiveness, and emotional dependency. Shakespeare instinctively captured these effects long before scientific terminology existed. Why else would Romeo want to be a glove touching Juliet’s cheek, the weirdo.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, magical love potions symbolise the chemical chaos of attraction. Characters fall instantly and irrationally in love, showing that desire often has little to do with logic or compatibility. Similarly, plays like Antony and Cleopatra and Twelfth Night portray powerful people acting immaturely, obsessively, and destructively under love’s influence.

Shakespeare is aware of the terrible negative power of unrequited love, jealousy, and emotional confusion, suggesting that rejection intensifies irrational behaviour because stress hormones disrupt clear judgment. Across his works, love is portrayed not as a perfect ideal but as a biological, emotional, and social force capable of both comedy and tragedy.

But he's not a complete misery guts when it comes to love. Genuine love develops when people move beyond fantasy and obsession. In As You Like It, characters learn to accept each other realistically, flaws included. Shakespeare suggests that time, self-awareness, and emotional honesty—not infatuation alone—are what transform foolish passion into lasting love.

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Today we're looking at bullying through the lens of Shakespeare’s plays, which show how bullies often attack a person’s self-worth rather than simply exerting power. Shakespeare, writing in the dangerous and politically volatile world of Elizabethan London, understood bullying both as personal cruelty and institutional oppression. Fellow playwrights such as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd suffered persecution, torture, and even death, demonstrating how fear and intimidation shaped the creative world Shakespeare inhabited.

Examples of bullying in Shakespeare include Prince Hal who in Henry IV Part 1 uses mockery and humiliation to dominate others, especially Falstaff, while Feste in Twelfth Night encourages collective ridicule against Malvolio. Shakespeare’s most sinister bully, however, is Iago from Othello, whose manipulation, racism, jealousy, and gaslighting destroy lives. Even Hamlet is presented as a more complex form of bully, inflicting emotional cruelty on Ophelia while consumed by his own grief.

Bullies are often driven by insecurity, resentment, or feelings of inadequacy. Shakespeare’s genius lies in portraying them not as monsters, but as damaged and vulnerable people whose actions still cause immense harm. Quiet honesty and forgiveness may sometimes be more powerful than dramatic revenge.

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For long periods of time I actively disliked Shakespeare. Especially when I was at school. they really didn't know how to teach it proper when I were a lad. The thing about school is that it’s rarely the subject that’s the problem, more the way it was taught. The reason I didn’t fully give up on Shakespeare was that having struggled with Richard the second the following year I was studying Antony and Cleopatra and we had a teacher who really brought the play to life for us.

The language is difficult, but honestly, it's like any new language, or new thing. The more you look at it the more you get out of it, and the easier it gets to understand. Who's your favourite actor? Chances are, there's a clip on YouTube of them performing something or other of Shakespeare. Lucky for me my favourite is Judi Dench. Can't move for the clips.

While we're at it, don't come running to me moaning that the plots are too complicated. Have you been to see a Superhero movie recently? Quite apart from the fact that nowadays actors tend to mumble their words to sound just like ordinary inaudible people, some of those plots make no sense whatsoever. Romeo and Juliet? Boy meets girl, they die. What could be simpler?

Why should you bother with Shakespeare? I mean what is the point of this podcast? Perhaps that’s a question I should have asked right at the beginning of episode one. I'm still quite new to this Shakespeare fanboy business, but the more I read and see the more I find out about who I truly am. Imagine a world full of self-aware people. Go on, dig deeper with me, you'll thank me for it.

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Shakespeare asks in As You Like It, and in this episode I explore how to navigate this complex emotional state with Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Oxford University and author of the delightfully accessible This Is Shakespeare.

That's a fab book which offers simple bite size chapters on 20 of the most well-known plays, and if that gives you the impression that it's simplistic it's not like that at all.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/This-Shakespeare-Pelican-Books-Smith/dp/024136163X

Each of the chapters in the book deals with a big theme or an issue related to Shakespeare, the play, or how the world was at the time he was writing it. I found in two or three of the chapters that there's a theme running through some of the plays of people wanting what they can't have. Or getting what they want and realising this isn't what they really wanted.

The problem with desire is its insatiable nature which drives a cycle of craving, fleeting satisfaction, and inevitable suffering. Often achieving one desire merely leads to the next, causing us to lose peace by focusing on what is absent rather than what we have.

Towards the end we look at how it's best to acknowledge and accept our desires rather than suppressing them, treating them as part of self-expression. Stop judging yourself for what you want; judgment blocks your ability to achieve those desires. To thine own self be true, as Polonius says in Hamlet, although thanks to Emma I now realise this isn't profound but more likely something that you'll find written on a tea towel in a tourist shop in Stratford-upon-Avon.

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Revenge is a primal human impulse, a desire to close a perceived circle of wrongdoing that exists in every culture. While justice aims to restore balance impersonally, revenge is a personal, emotional pursuit of gratification through retaliation. This is dramatised in Shakespeare's works, which serve as a psychological blueprint for revenge's irrational escalation. In The Winter's Tale, King Leontes’s unfounded jealousy triggers a chain of destruction, demonstrating how suspicion alone can fuel the need for retribution. Henry V shows how a perceived slight (a gift of tennis balls) is used to justify horrific violence, framed as divine will, illustrating the performative, spectacle-driven nature of revenge that makes backing down impossible.

Along the way I get to talk about the slow-motion disaster of my own stand-up comedy career.

But it's not all laughs.

The drive for revenge often stems from profound humiliation, a social pain that activates the same neural pathways as physical hurt. In Othello, Iago's simmering resentment over a promotion and racial prejudice is served cold, meticulously manipulating Othello’s insecurities to destroy him. Conversely, Richard III presents a man who, feeling personally and physically aggrieved by the world, adopts villainy as a form of revenge against everyone he perceives as his superior. The cycle becomes most toxic when it becomes self-perpetuating, as in Titus Andronicus, where an initial act of religious retribution spirals into a grotesque, endless series of atrocities, each justified as payment for the last. Breaking the cycle requires rejecting the logic of "an eye for an eye." I try and explain and hopefully justify the idea that real strength lies not in emulating your enemy but in rising above negativity, understanding rather than hating, and focusing on living well. As Romeo and Juliet tragically shows, when communities are governed by reflexive feuds, everyone loses. The true answer may not be revenge, nor even justice, but the difficult, conscious choice to stop the cycle before it consumes all involved.

The real strength lies not in emulating your enemy but in rising above negativity, understanding rather than hating, and focusing on living well. As Romeo and Juliet tragically shows, when communities are governed by reflexive feuds, everyone loses. The true answer may not be revenge, nor even justice, but the difficult, conscious choice to stop the cycle before it consumes all involved.

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It's okay to be bored, Shakespeare shows us how to live without our phones - not yet, you have to listen to the episode first.

We're all looking for excitement, almost all of the time, stimulation in whatever form. Almost every one of us is carrying the equivalent of a packet of cigarettes in our pocket, only there isn't just one dangerous habit we're being asked to indulge, it's not just the tobacco company hoping we'll reach for that thing in our pockets, take out a stick of dangerous life-threatening chemicals, light it and inhale them. There are hundreds of billion dollar companies all offering the equivalent, and while the reward isn't as immediately dangerous to our health, over time it's going to frazzle our brains into a mush of garbage

I could make this one of those four hour long podcasts like Andrew Huberman the supplement selling scientist… who loves Joe Strummer so he can’t be all bad, I mean I once listened to him talk for two hours 19 minutes and 24 seconds about sleep which paradoxically kept me awake the whole time. What would my version be? “In today’s episode about boredom, in the first hour I intend to stare at a white wall in my kitchen and share with you my thoughts about every paint stroke, blemish or unlikely food stain contained therein.”

Conversely perhaps I should make this episode only five minutes long tl/dr it’s good to be bored. Now run along and get scrolling, use those opposable thumbs that were evolved exactly for the purpose of sliding up a screen of information...

Shakespeare was also battling for peoples' attention with all sorts of gimmicks and gizmos designed to make the audience go ooh, ahh and eeeurrgh. He dealt with all the things that lead us to fighting boredom - impatience, not liking the company of our own thoughts, discomfort. But when he'd run out of sword fights, magic tricks and live animals running across the stage he let us stop, pause for breath, and he would get us engaged with the real people. Maybe you should be doing that - any time you're feeling bored, ask yourself why? What's making you feel uncomfortable? Sit with it for a while. You never know where it might take you.

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Only one thing is certain about this world - uncertainty. True 425 years ago. True now.

Remember Covid? How the planet stopped. Everything in the world was uncertain. Nobody knew what would happen next. Now imagine it coming back tomorrow. And again in 2030. That’s how it was with the plague in Shakespeare’s time. When we’re living in a world that’s full of uncertainty, how do we stay reassured?

In today's episode I'm looking at all the uncertainties Shakespeare had to live with. Playwrights were frequently sent to jail for criticising their leaders and theatres were shut down, the country was paralysed by fear of the unknown, nobody knew who would succeed Elizabeth the first and many doubted the transition to the next monarch would be a peaceful one. And on top of all that were the plagues.

Shakespeare’s whole life was plagued by uncertainty and uncertaintied by plague.

In Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar the emperor is assassinated, it’s an event that shakes the world but those responsible don’t appear to have a clue what to do next. We’re in a place that’s about as uncertain as it’s possible to be. It was only after they killed him that they stopped for a moment and thought – “oh. Now what?” This was the ruler of the known world. His death created a void. No one was in charge.

Ask yourself where are you now? What is one step you can take to move forward? Go on take a punt. At this stage if it doesn’t work out you can always take one back.

Then again, what if you have no idea what even the next step might be? I look at a few things you can do, such as control the controllables, get a hobby, see where the gaps in your information are, stay connected with people, and to look for unusual opportunities

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There's no right or wrong way to deal with grief, but as the man says if we want to move forward we need to acknowledge it.

Medicine and science have helped to remove a lot of physical pain from our lives, and overall we live healthier and for longer, but eventually we all gotta go, that fact hasn’t changed through all of humanity. And the emotional pain we suffer from grieving is no less agonising than it was in Shakespeare’s day. The departure of the dying leaves a gap in the lives of those left behind. It can manifest itself in a thousand ways but we manage to encapsulate all of that in the single word grief. And there are few writers who capture the emotions with more depth and empathy than Shakespeare.

We often talk about the five stages of grief. Some people say it's seven, I'd like to think it's more like 11. It's not like they all happen the same for everyone, in the same order, and that when you get to the end of stage 11 everything will be just tickety boo. You can experience some conflicting ones at the same time - when I think of people I've lost I often find acceptance and denial living in the same place in my head.

There's nothing, at least I've found in my own experience, quite like the shock of hearing about the death of a friend or a loved one. As the days turn into weeks and some semblance of normality returns, grief takes on a new form. The grief never goes away, but it takes on a new form.

At some point, we’re going to have to come to terms with it. I've found there's a lot of comfort to be had from Shakespeare, who writes beautifully about grief in Richard the Second, Hamlet and King John. But this is one of my favouritesfrom the sonnets:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end;

Each changing place with that which goes before,

In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

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As a teenager in the 1970s battling racism I'd always thought of Shakespeare as the embodiment of English nationalism. In this delightful episode Michael Dobson, head of the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-upon-Avon, explains why I couldn't have been more wrong. He immediately puts me right about Henry V. I associate many of his barnstorming speeches with the kind of knuckle headed blokes who used to chase the minority kids like me for sport. 'Once more unto the breech dear friends'... 'we band of brothers, for we who shed our blood today are brothers.' No we're not, Michael explains, as soon as the fighting is over Henry ignores those supposed brothers and concentrates instead on the high ranking lords in his army.

Shakespeare's plays are always dealing with nationalism as history, but they're also navigating the problems of nationalism he was facing in his present day. He was careful not to attack whoever was the monarch at the time he was writing, and plays like Richard the Third and Macbeth deliver hostory in the way that the ruling monarch wanted to hear it - but he also made clear the limitations of patriotism. Henry the fourth tells his soon to be crowned son Henry the fifth to make sure he could distract the masses by "busying giddy minds with foreign quarrels."

And in the end Michael shows how Shakespeare exposes the contradictions of nationalism - and how someone like me can happily say I'm proud to be British, thanks to the tolerance of the people towards my grandparents who came over here fleeing for their lives from Russian cossacks. Thank you England!

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Today we look at the fuss around who wrote Shakespeare and how his works can help us uncover the truth. Actually if you're hoping that this is one of those episodes that asks the question 'did Shakespeare actually write the plays or was it someone else?' I'm afraid I'm not even beginning to deal with that. First of all we already know that some of his plays were collaborations, others involve large chunks of history stolen verbatim from old books - and you know what, even if he didn't write a single word I don't care, I love the words and turns of phrase and it doesn't make any difference to me wh wrote them.

No what I'm really interested in is why are we so keen to listen to conspiracy theories? For this episode I'm especially indebted to James Shapiro, probably the gereatest living writer about Shakespeare. His book Contested Will - Who Wrote Shakespeare, goes into great detail about all the alternative suggestions, as well as looking at famous Shakespeare deniers including Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud. It's a great read and you can pick it up here (I'm just a fan by the way, not an affiliate) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Contested-Will-Who-Wrote-Shakespeare/dp/0571235778

Fact is, too often we all like to believe things to be facts and sometimes we're conspiracists without even realising it. Get a grip people! (self included)

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Time and again when I’ve wondered how and why it is that almost every person I’ve ever voted for fails to live up to my expectations, it turns out there’s nearly always an answer somewhere in Shakespeare.

Where does it all go wrong?

If you want to be a leader at work or in your community, beware the pitfalls.In this episode I look at all the reasons why we always end up being disappointed when someone new takes over. I argue that quite a lot of the reason is in the nature of the people who want to be in charge - sometimes they're too taken in by flattery, from people who should be telling them the truth. In other instances, as soon as they take charge they spend the whole of the time in the new job battling to ensure they stay there. Sometimes the right person to win the war is the wrong person to rule in peacetime.

Shakespeare has loads of examples of all these types. I never like imposing my 21st century viewpoints on plays written 425 years ago but whenever leaders fall people often talk about how their demise is 'Shakespearean.' But what would an episode about Mindset be without me pontificating on some way in which we can learn from this in our daily lives. And the biggest thing I think I've learned in the last couple of years or so of reading these plays is - one of the biggest parts of the problem is our fault. Why do we place so much faith in the idea that one person alone can solve incredibly complex problems of governing? Isn't it the case in almost everything in our lives that the best way to get results is teamwork? Well that's my theory and this is my podcast so there.

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You've assassinated the supreme leader. Now what? Today I'm looking at Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and why if you're going to be bold you need to consider the consequences ahead of acting. Loads of Shakespeare's plays are about kings and leaders from hundreds of years ago, what might any of their lives have to do with you? Well for most of our lives we're pretty much like them - we get up in the morning, eat, work, discharge our bodily fluids and sleep. We have relationships, and things we do for fun.

The only difference is that we spend most of our lives reasonably contented doing most of the same things most of the time. We live our lives by what Shakespeare calls 'the fault of our stars'. In other words, life happens to us. Occasionally though we have to make a big, life-changing decision. Some people develop a taste for life-changing decisions, and they keep making them. That, in the simplest of terms, is how we take back control of our lives.

The problem is, though, sometimes we make these big decisions, do these big things, without thinking through the consequences. In Julius Caesar,the Senators know for sure that they are determined to assassinate the supreme leader. This they do, swiftly and brutally - or Brutusly if you prefer the kind of groaner of a joke that I insist on making throughout these shows. But then... what? It's kind of assumed that Brutus will take over but he has barely prepared for the post. The man most qualified, Anthony, stayed loyal to Casar to the end, and in a single inspired moment he takes his opportunity and challenges Brutus for the succession.

Again you ask, what's this got to do with me? Here's what - sometimes we stop short of doing things that can alter the course of our lives. Sometimes? Who am I kidding, all the time. In this episode let me - and Shakey - help you identify those moments, and give you a leg up when it comes to seizing them.

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This week I talk to the writer Stefan Stern about how to get on in the world without resorting to murder most foul. And he's very well qualified to discuss this - he has, after all written The Lady Macbeth Guide To Ambition, a book that offers guidance with the help of Shakespeare's most celebrated Mr and Mrs couple the Macbeths and you can get it here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fair-Foul-Macbeth-Guide-Ambition/dp/1800183186

If you're going to do the deed, Macbeth runinates, is best were done quickly, and yes, it's possible to do well in your world by being the first one to act. 'Fortune favours the bold', no Shakespeare didn't write that, it sounds more like something you'll read in a Chinese restaurant fortune cookie but it definitely works for us too. We talk about the difference in attitude between Brits and Americans. In the States this kind of 'go for it' approach is largely approved of, whereas here we tend to be a bit sniffy about ambitious people. We still have them though, don't we? And Stefan and I also discuss the ways in which, even if you don't resort to murder, you can go too far in aiming for what you want from the world.

We talk about how much success is enough, whether ambition in men versus women is still a thing, and if it's true that in order for me to succeed you have to fail.

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Why are we so obsessed with time? And why do we think we have so little of it? Shakespeare has an answer or two. This week I try and make sense of time with the help of a few of Shakespeare's characters. And to look at how it dominates so much of our lives. Why? I think it's because there's one thing which most of us will never have any control over - our deaths. We know that time is going to come to an end, and it could well be sudden, in which case we'd better get on with life while we're still here.

One of the best definitions of time comes in As You Like It, the play that also famously reminds us that all the world's a stage and you and I are merely actors on it. Time moves at different speeds depending who you are - for example the young teenage lover Juliet waiting for Romeo every second is an hour, for the thief walking to the gallows it's moving at a frantically fast pace. Pretty amazing of Shakespeare to spot this don't you think? I did and to me it's just one more example of how reading Shakespeare has made me look at my own life in a totally different way.

Often we have a distorted view of time, and I think one of the reasons we're so obsessed with TV shows and stories about time travel is because when things go wrong we have this secret desire to go back to the thing and fix it. I know I did, after my spectacular failure of a stand up career ten years after it began. But these episodes can only be so long, and that's going to be a story for another time.

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The man himself was no stranger to fear, the 1590s were an exciting time to be a playwright, but also a scary one. Two of his colleagues died in mysterious circumstances while another was sent to prison, nice not to have the competition but you neverknow if you're going to be the next one. But even though they didn't have self-help books or well being podcasts in his time, Shakespeare became a model exampleof the phrase 'feel the fear and do it anway.'

I explain some of my own fears which almost caused me to decide not to make this podcast at all - not least because like so many British schoolchildren I grew up hating the plays, when they weren't boring the pants off me. Who am I to thrust the Complete Works on you lot? But here I am.

Shakespeare likes to put the fear up our backsides like so many writers. You won't come out of Titus Andronicus feeling bright and breezy, and even a fun play like Midsummer Night's dream is mostly set in a dark woods at night, examining our darkest fears in a way that predates Freud by several hundred years.

Shakespeare taught me not to care what other people think. Yes there are millions of schoolchildren around the world and many others who can’t stand his writing but what does he care? He died more than 400 years ago.

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