Behind the Scenes Minis: Mary Sidney and Holodomor

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class A production of I Heart Radio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson. We talked about Mary Sidney Herbert this week, who has been on my list for a while. Like I said, she um that disappearing inc thing got mentioned in our research for an episode of CRIMINALI, and I was like, I haven't done an episode on her, and I mean to um, she's very interesting for a number of reasons. One like, we didn't really get into it, but this was a time when she was trying to really like bolster the literary world of England. This was a time when great works were not written in English, yet they were you know, Italian writers, French writers, etcetera. Were the ones in the Western world that we're considered to be writing the great works. And so it was really significant that she was like, great, I'm going to translate those into English and make them something that we do, and make them models for how English writers can develop their own, um, their own works, and thus kind of she planted the seeds of English literature essentially, Um, the Shakespeare thing is very interesting. She was a contemporary of Shakespeare. She was born I think two years three years before him and died five years after him. I think that's correct. My numbers might not be exactly right, but she book ends him by a marginal, narrow margin on either side. Um. There is a really really interesting book that I was aware of and read, had read a while back, and I came back to it for this by um a historian named Robin Williams, who really like digs deep on the dirt of the Sydney family and how Mary's sons in particular got their positions in court, which is some of that kind of seedy um. But she also talks about how she really believes that historian truly believes that that Mary Sidney was writing the work of Shakespeare. And one of the cases she makes is that this is a woman who was from a literary family. Her parents wrote, all of her siblings wrote, you know, her children wrote like they were all writers and thinkers. And there isn't really the same case to be made for William Shakespeare. Um that he just kind of, you know, pops onto the scene. And I don't have a firm that's not an area of study. In comparison, I have done a lot of work on I just want to mention it in case any of our listeners who want to go check that one out, because I feel like they're they're always a lot of Really this person wrote the works of Shakespeare, and I'm yeah, I am not willing to an express express an opinion on it because people are too ready to yell about it, right. I mean that's the thing too, That is a that is a dangerous area to stroll into if you are a historian, um, because people feel strongly about it, which is I'm just relaying with that I don't actually have a strong opinion because I'm like, this is going to sound very counter to our entire show. But at the end of the day, I don't care who wrote them. We have them and that's what's important. Um. Which is not to say that it isn't important to like figure out correct attribution and whatnot, but just that particular body of work is so debated over and there are so many scholars way deeper into it than I could ever be that I don't, Um, that's their domain. Um, Which isn't to say that I'm not interested in their work, just I know I don't have the depth of experience and study that other people have, And I'm like, great, can I still read Midsummer Nights Dream whenever I want? Great, great, great, great great great. I love this idea that in her I don't want to call it old age because I don't even think, you know, your fifties are old age. That would feel very sad for me to say right now. But I like in her her mature years, once her children were married off, she was just like fun time for Mary. Yeah. I Um. I started looking for a picture to put on her social media with this episode before I had read through the whole outline. Um, and uh. There was one picture in particular, which I don't think was the one that I wound up picking for various reasons, where I was like, something about this picture, she looks a little bit like a pirate. Like it wasn't just the clothing of the era, it's like something about it just seemed a little piratical. Uh. And then I got to the end of the episode and I was like, oh, maybe that's why she was running around shooting pistols and stuff at this point. Maybe she also, um she did in that whole thing, that whole era where she was being very litigious, uh, and trying to put down peasant uprisings. She she did, her family in their lands were involved on the other side of piracy, of trying to capture pirates, and because they had land at Cardiff that was that was being um endangered by pirate activity and whatnot at times. Um, yes, it does seem fun to think that she would be out like with her lady friends shooting pistols. Fun. Yeah, um yeah, it's very interesting. Different historians have very different takes on her. Some are like, yes, she was, you know, this brazen redhead who seized all the power, and it's like, well, she was, but she also was pretty smart about working the system and maintaining her her image as like a very proper woman and and um and lady of the day, and maintaining her connection to the crown in a way that was you know, respectful up until William caused all kinds of problems. But she's an interesting one, Mary Sidney Herbert. Without her, we would probably not have so many pieces of literature that she either patronized directly or you know, just um encouraged writers to to go on with their careers and create other things, which in turn inspired other writers, etcetera, etcetera. Thus now we have the English literary tradition which so many of us studied in college and probably never heard of Mary Herbert in the mix. No, definitely heard of her brother though, yep, so her her entire plan worked. Um, good job. Mary. One of the things we talked about this week was the whole little more the famine that struck Ukraine in three which so many people have asked about. I just I put the term in in our email, which is an our Our email address has changed a couple of times over the years, and there's a whole lot of email that is from way back that I no longer have. But it brought up like twenty emails that were all requests to talk about this particular event in history. Yeah, it's definitely not our most fun and kickie episode. But also, I mean it evidence has so many problems bawled up into one. Yeah, it's an example of what the relationship between Ukraine and Russia, or in the time that this was actually happening between Ukraine and the Greater Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has been like going through history and that things like what's happening now with Russia invading Ukraine is part of a historical context that does not include this Ukraine and Russia having been inseparable entities going back to time immemorial. That's just correct. Um. One thing that I was really struck by as I was working on this was that parts of it felt really similar to the Great Famine in China uh while Mao Zadong was in power, which we covered on the show. I have not listened to that episode in a really long time, so I don't know if that holds up. But there were similar collectivization efforts that did not go well and fed into this famine that was then addressed in a way that a lot of ways made it work, which is really one of the hallmarks of famines. Like when there is a food shortage and the people in the government and the international community respond to that food shortage in a thoughtful and proactive way to get food where it needs to go, that does not blossom into a famine. Like the food shortage becomes a famine when it's handled in a way that that the steps that need to be taken are not taken to stop people from starving to death. Um. Like most things that we think of as famine have a man made component. Even when it's like a widespread regional shortage of food brought on by something like a drought or a monsoon or some other natural disaster, failure to respond to the natural disaster is is often what pushes it from being a hardship into a catastrophe. Yes. Yeah, It's one of those things where I in my cynical old age, like when I look at this whole thing and I step back, I feel like so much of these problems is driven by megalomaniacal ego. Yeah, right, Like that's just it. Like a couple of people in power who have that character trait can literally cause devastation. Yeah. Yeah. And there was a lot about this that directly came from the policies of Joseph Stalin and the people who were closest to him politically. Uh, and in the hierarchy of the U S. S R. It was weird to work on this in the context of what is happening in the world right now. Um, this has been on my short list of topics for a really, really long time, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is definitely a thing that made me go this is this is part of this history equal context that is connected to what's happening right now, and so it feels like I should move this to the top of the list. But also having something horrifying happening relating to the same you know, the same uh people's in the same countries. Uh, added a whole layer of urgency, I think is the word in terms of uh, my focus and work on it. Right. I'm trying not to take away the most negative thing of like we'll never fix anything, which is where I have been on a lot of these discussions lately, which is not awesome. So hopefully everyone will remember that we have to keep doing our best to make the world better, even if it doesn't always feel like it's working. Yeah. So, since this is Friday, whatever was happening over folks this weekends, I hope it's going as well as possible. We will be back with us Sturday Classic tomorrow. Actually tomorrow, Saturday Classic is on Rafael Olympkin, so uh connected to what we just talked about today. He came up in today's episode, so we'll be there for that, and then we'll be here next week with brand new episodes. 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