Bjorn Quiring. Shakespeare's Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama. Trans. Michael Winkler and Bjorn Quiring. Discourses of Law. New York: Routledge, 2014. Pp. ix + 268. $145.00. For Bjorn Quiring's Shakespeare's Curse: The Aporias of Ritual Exclusion in Early Modern Royal Drama, curses are not simply stuff of Lear's theatrical howls or Margaret's vituperative pronouncements. Rather, Quiring aligns curse with Derrida's concept of supplement, defining as that which can complement and represent law, but also threatens to dissolve and replace it (2). This foundation leads him to posit that curses mark point where absolute power and complete impotence blend and become indistinguishable: curse is speech act that demonstrates impossibility of speech acts (3). In post-Reformation England, curses function as vestiges of defunct Catholic Church, paradoxically illegitimate yet potent insofar as they integrate themselves into other institutions that include theatre and law. Early modern theatre has particular affinity for performances of curses such that, as Quiring contends, the ritual of execration might be seen as dark precursor of theater (14). To unpack all that is contained within curse, then, is to learn something of early modern theatre. And in his attention to juristic themes in his selected plays, Quiring traces foundations of Western law to curse as well. Though anchored to an early modern context, study ultimately aims to remedy absence of scholarship regarding nature of curse in modern era, arguing that traces of curse persist in contemporary speech acts. Quiring's study brings an ambitious assemblage of literary, juridical, religious, theological, theoretical, and political sources to bear on three of Shakespeare's royal plays--Richard III, King John, and King Lear--in three chapters of varying length. With new historicist methodology, Quiring interprets episodes of cursing as ideal index fossils of secularization overpowered by its mythic latencies (17). Although chapters themselves are organized from Shakespeare's early to later plays, project also features retrograde movement through time as begins with proximate present of Richard III and concludes with King Lears ancient Britain. For Quiring, this structure is purposeful, subtle addition to an argument concerning curses peculiar temporality in which past and future collapse into each other. Yet chapter organization, interrupted by numerous subsections, sometimes obscures overall argument, although there is no shortage of refreshing analysis and incisive claims. Even for scholars intimate with plays, Quiring's careful readings are as pleasurable as they are erudite. After generous orientation to his theoretical scaffolding, Quiring turns his attention to Richard III and to analogs of curse (e.g., excommunication, oath, prophecy) in first chapter, which comprises nearly half of book. Even as he catalogs these analogs in detail, chapter is preoccupied with question of irony, and Richard himself is read as emblematic of phenomenon. Commencing play as malevolent yet captivating chameleon, Richard deploys irony to consolidate his power but, by its end, finds himself subject to irony he had once so skillfully wielded. Only ironic structure of representation itself is truly sovereign (125), Quiring concludes, and what Shakespearean theatre reveals is aporetic structure of curse, a irony that acknowledges autonomous field of representation, defined by endless sliding of signifier, as true sovereign (142). Put simply, Richard III demonstrates that irony, characterized by infinite play of meaning-making, animates early modern curse. Interpreting King John as display of hollowness in which concepts such as history and sovereignty are emptied of their significance (163), Quiring begins his brief second chapter. …