Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint by Lee Durkee

https://amzn.to/42VgEF8

A darkly humorous and spellbinding detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man’s relentless search for an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare.

Following his divorce, down-and-out writer and Mississippi exile Lee Durkee holed himself up in a Vermont fishing shack and fell prey to a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point.

Stalking Shakespeare is Durkee’s fascinating memoir about a hobby gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Durkee’s own unrelenting search for a lost picture of the Bard painted from real life. As Durkee becomes better at beguiling curators into testing their paintings with X-ray and infrared technologies, we get a front-row seat to the captivating mysteries—and unsolved murders—surrounding the various portraits rumored to depict Shakespeare.

Whisking us backward in time through layers of paint and into the pages of obscure books on the Elizabethans, Durkee travels from Vermont to Tokyo to Mississippi to DC and ultimately to London to confront the stuffy curators forever protecting the Bard’s image. For his part, Durkee is the adversary they didn’t know they had—a self-described dilettante with nothing to lose, the “Dan Brown of English portraiture.”

A lively, bizarre, and surprisingly moving blend of biography, art history, and madness, Stalking Shakespeare is as entertaining as it is rigorous and will forever change the way you look at one of history’s greatest cultural and literary icons.

About the Author

Lee Durkee’s novel THE LAST TAXI DRIVER (Tin House Books) was named a Best Book of the Year in three countries in 2021. He is also the author of the novel RIDES OF THE MIDWAY (WW Norton, 2001). His memoir STALKING SHAKESPEARE, which chronicles his hilarious and irreverent two decade obsession with finding lost portraits of William Shakespeare, will be released by Scribner Books in April 2023. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Sun, The Oxford American, Zoetrope, Garden & Gun, Tin House, & Mississippi Noir. He lives in North Mississippi.