The Shakespeare Mindset: Calm Your Anxiety In This Fast-Paced World With Help From The Most Famous Writer In The Universe

"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break."

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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"This England never did nor never shall Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror, But when it first did help to wound itself."

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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"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

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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"Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown."

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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"Wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast."

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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"Dreams, indeed, are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream."

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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"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me."

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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"Our doubts are traitors, And makes us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt." What's holding you back in life? Shakespeare knows, and I'm here to tell you how to fix it.

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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