The Shakespeare Mindset: Improve your life the Bard way not the hard way

"To unpathed waters, undreamed shores."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.

"Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!"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.

"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

"That tragedy from which she rescues him gratuitously for the sake of their mutual welfare."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.

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."... "They laugh that win"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.

"I understand a fury in your words, / But not the words."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…