Overview
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.
āIntensely readableā¦with bust-out laughing momentsā (Garden & Gun), Stalking Shakespeare is Durkeeās fascinating memoir about a hobby gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Durkeeās 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 Bardās image. For his part, Durkee is the adversary they didnāt know they hadāa self-described dilettante with nothing to lose, the āDan Brown of Elizabethan portraiture.ā
A bizarre and surprisingly moving blend of biography, art history, and madness, Stalking Shakespeare is a āgripping, poignant, and enjoyableā (The Washington Post) journey that will forever change the way you look at one of historyās greatest cultural and literary icons.
This book title, Stalking Shakespeare (A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint), ISBN: 9781982127169, by Lee Durkee, published by Scribner (December 31, 2045) is available in paperback. Our minimum order quantity is 25 copies. All standard bulk book orders ship FREE in the continental USA and delivered in 4-10 business days.
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