A darkly humorous and spellbinding detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man’s relentless search for an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare.
Join Lee Durkee as he speaks about Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint on Tuesday, May 2nd at 6:00 PM in the Community Room of the Pass Christian Library. Lee was last with us three years ago with the publication of his novel, The Last Taxi Driver.
"Hold on for a wild ride . . . Wielding an elegant and eclectic writing style, Durkee lobs words like firecrackers, holding our wide-eyed attention as he blazes through to his point. . . . The soul of this story is the author, a battered man, broken-hearted, Adderall addicted, the epitome of a lost spirit, gracious, without an ounce of avarice, not so much looking for the ad vivum Shakespeare, I submit, but inner peace and purpose, a quiet spot in the sunlight, the ad vivum Durkee. . . . [a] beautifully penned quest of stalking the inexplicable." - Scott Naugle / Leader's Edge
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.
Lee Durkee is the author of The Last Taxi Driver, named a Kirkus Reviews Best Novel of 2021, Rides of the Midway, and Stalking Shakespeare. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper's, The Sun, Oxford American, Zoetrope: All Story, and Mississippi Noir. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.
