# Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint - Hardcover

by **Lee Durkee** (Author)

**"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 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.

### Author Biography

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.

**Number of Pages:** 272

**Dimensions:** 1.02 x 9.06 x 5.98 IN

**Illustrated:** Yes

**Publication Date:** April 18, 2023

## Details

- **Price:** 28.0 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 28.00 USD | In stock |

## Images

- Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint - Hardcover

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