"Your hopes and friends are infinite."

Everyone wants a level of success - surely no disagreement about that? We can't all go it alone though, which doesn't stop us trying. It's not easy working out how much you should achieve success by your own means, and how much you need the help of others.

The internet and social media are stuffed with individuals bragging about how successful they are, and how important it is to co-operate and work as part of a team. Weirdly, sometimes it's the same person saying both things.

So many of Shakespeare's plays, especially the histories and tragedies, highlight the dangers of what happens when a king refuses to take the advice of friends, relatives or supportive colleagues. After all, they made it to the top of tree, which is more than you managed Mr Second in Command loozah.

Henry the fifth is an extremely rare king out of all the Shakespeare plays. He's one of the very few monarchs who is still alive at the end. And part of the reason for that is because he listens to the advice of others, and sometimes changes his mind as a result.

We can learn a lot from him even though it's more than 600 years since the battle of Agincourt and if I'm honest with you once he became king he wasn't that great by the end (are they ever?). But I think we can learn an awful lot more from Coriolanus, who has absolutely no interest in being part of a team. This is a man who'd listen to your advice if you were three times world chess champion and he wanted to know his next move, then deliberately do the opposite because if you're a world chess champion you've obviously never engaged in brutal battle to the death with your sword.

Mainly, that while it's important on occasion to go it alone, two heads are better than one unless you're the two headed Dog Orthrus from Greek Mythology who is sain by Heracles.

Plays mentioned this week include Henry the Fifth, Othello, and 'there's only one I in' Coriolanus.

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"The sands are numbered, that make up my life."

Wouldn't life be wonderful if we were 10 pounds lighter or a thousand pounds richer? Whether you're trying to lose the pounds or gain them, having a specific number to aim for isn't necessarily going to make you happier. I've always had a tendency to overweightness, and I can't tell you how many times I've celebrated reaching my goal weight by stuffing my face with cake and beer.

Numbers can give us a sense of achievement but they can also make us miserable.

It's time to take a look at those digits on the page, give them a beady stare and remind them of their place, and that they are not the holy grail, merely a bunch of squiggles.

Everybody was getting very excited by numbers around the time of Shakespeare, especially as people switched over from using Roman numerals to the Hindu-Arabic symbols we've been using ever since. Imagine being able to write 1883 in numbers and not, as it would have been around the time Shakespeare was born, MDCCCLXXXIII.

But there's a danger of those numbers taking on extra meaning. Big isn't necessarily good, sometimes less is more, and on other occasions we can give numbers a significance beyond their simple squiggle meaning.

I'd like to think that by the end of this episode you will have added up all the pros and cons, multiplied by three, taken away the number you first thought of and realised that there's a heck of a lot more to life than numbers.

Plays mentioned this week include Henry 20% (just kidding, it's really called Henry the fifth), Richards II and III, King Lear and The Tempest.

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"Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed."

Do you ever get the feeling that however much you're doing, however hard you try, however fast you're moving, you feel like you're getting nowhere?

Sounds to me like you're (I'm) suffering from burnout. No this isn't one of those podcasty words like manifestation and journalling, burnout is a real medical thing with serious consequences if you don't deal with it.

Did Shakespeare suffer from burnout? How could he, the bloomin thing was only invented in 1974? I'm not going to go there and try and take modern things and impose them on his life - although today's quote at the start comes from one of his sonnets so even if he didn't suffer it he sure as heck knows how to describe the feeling.

If you can manage for a moment to lift the duvet from over your head and peep back into the world that made you weary with toil in today's episode I hope to ease you gently back to a place where you can at least feel strong enough to step back in and win back your life.

No one will ever be able to say what Shakespeare was going through, but strangely everything that happened to him in a crucial five year period maps perfectly onto the classic definition of burnout, from massively productive honeymoon period down to total crashout, and everything in between. The way he gets out of it as well mirrors what we can do in our own lives to escape its clutches.

There are few plays looked at in this episode because I am daring to discuss only Shakespeare's life, but Twelfth Night gets a special mention because it falls slap in the middle of Shakespeare's 'burn-out/not burn-out' phase.

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