The <i>Bal des Ardents</i> (1393), Thomas of Woodstock (1397) and Richard II (1400): Three Medieval Conspiracy Rumours and the Scots’ Mine Play (1608).

Assassination vehicles in Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies sometimes involve meta-theatrical court festival massacres: court performances embedded within full-length drama, resulting in violent death or trauma to characters in the play. During his career as a playwright (c. 1600–08), John Marston pioneered the masquerade-within as a popular sub-category of court festival massacre. Were such underhand festival appropriations wholly inspired by stage precedents? Or did they also occur in real life? Whether its deaths were accidental or resulted from a botched assassination plot, the 1393 Bal des Ardents was hugely culturally and politically influential. Its continuing cultural afterlives bear witness to the geographical, chronological and social shockwaves of a medieval event whose impact illuminates the persistent collective trauma generated by extreme modern assassinations. My researches identify the conspiracy rumours encouraged in the wake of the 1393 Paris disaster and two English conspiracies of 1397 and 1400 linked to court festivals, as key to a fresh approach to the meta-theatrical court festival massacre, and to interpretation of two plays traditionally discussed together, which refer to these English conspiracies, Shakespeare’s Richard II and the anonymous Thomas of Woodstock. My analysis supports a post-Elizabethan dating of Woodstock, and encourages the hypothesis that it could be the so-called Scots’ Mine Play of 1608, the lost Jacobean play thought by some to have ended Marston’s career as a playwright

Time Reference in the Service of Social Action

The present study investigates the ways that members of society refer to time. Concrete methods for communicating about points in time and locating events in relation to them make relevant and thereby ground abstract time-reckoning in the lives of interactants. Through a taxonomy of references to time—termed absolute and event-relative, each with subcategories— we describe the intrinsic affordances that different designs provide coparticipants engaging in social interaction. In analyzing talk from both ordinary and institutional contexts, we demonstrate how these affordances can be mobilized in the co-construction and maintenance of intersubjectivity, in managing interpersonal relationships, and in conjunction with a variety of social actions. By describing how sociotemporal ordering is invoked, put into use, and contextually achieved in the immediacy of quotidian conduct, we posit that time-reckoning categories are social not only in their construction but also in their everyday use