Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint
£13.98
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.
“Intensely readable…with bust-out laughing moments” (Garden & Gun), 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 Elizabethan portraiture.”
A bizarre and surprisingly moving blend of biography, art history, and madness, Stalking Shakespeare is a “gripping, poignant, and enjoyable” (The Washington Post) journey that will forever change the way you look at one of history’s greatest cultural and literary icons.
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by Michael D
A beautifully written and thoughtful book.
Personal, witty, factual, but above all, an important work.
Lee combines shrewd commentary on how institutions seem to value their investments above finding the truth about their “portraits”, with a persistence in wanting to track down the elusive ad-vivum portrait of Shakespeare – if it exists. He thinks it must, and I tend to agree.
It’s as much a personal story of deep interest (Lee calls it obsession – which undermines the level of his knowledge and expertise) as it is an attempt to find out which Elizabethan portrait might be the real face of Shakespeare.
It is not a comprehensive review of all the usual suspects claiming to be a portrait of Shakespeare – it’s actually more important than that: a call to everyone involved in Shakespeare history to look at all possibilities, rigorously check provenance, and apply technical and scientific methods where possible.
Will the real Will stand up?
When he does, I think it might just be the charming but slightly ugly Buttery portrait (my favourite) or the Hunt portrait (the missing one) , which I sort of think may be the author’s favourite. What am I taking about. Read the book.