
Stalking Shakespeare
A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint
- 320 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Stalking Shakespeare
A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint
About this book
*Winner of the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award for Life Writing* "A wickedly entertaining" ( The New York Times ) 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."Intensely readableā¦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 mysteriesāand unsolved murdersāsurrounding 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 hadāa 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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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Prologue: Hideous Shakespeare
- Part One: A Mind of Winter
- Part Two: The Great Unknown
- Epilogue: England
- Photographs
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- Bibliography
- Additional Image Credits
- Copyright