Disclosure / Disclaimer: I received this ebook, free of charge,from Mariner Books via Netgalley, for review purposes on this blog. No other compensation, monetary or in kind, has been received or implied for this post. Nor was I told how to post about it. All opinions are my own.
A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint
A darkly humorous and spellbinding detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man’s relentless search for an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare.
Synopsis:
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.
Review:
We all know the story of Shakespeare not writing all his playes, that his name is a psuedonym, but how many are aware, that we may not ACTUALLY know what he looks like, and that generations have been the victim of a series of 'public cons'? While the premise may seem dry, the book is anythng but! I don't remember ever laughing out loud so hard with a historical book before, Lee has a knack for setting up a situation, and making the 15th century interesting! LOL By taking it a chapter or two at a time, the book stays interesting and may illicit some late night searching on the web for full color illustrations, for those using an ereader! It's a great look at how the underdog can discover something the professionslas have overlooked and find the needle in the haystack, which in this case, is closer to who Sakespeare actually was!
About the Author:
Lee Durkee's novel THE LAST TAXI DRIVER (Tin House Books) was named a Best Book of the Year in three countries in 2021. He is also the author of the novel RIDES OF THE MIDWAY (WW Norton, 2001). His memoir STALKING SHAKESPEARE, which chronicles his hilarious and irreverent two decade obsession with finding lost portraits of William Shakespeare, will be released by Scribner Books in April 2023. His stories and essays have appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The Sun, The Oxford American, Zoetrope, Garden & Gun, Tin House, & Mississippi Noir. He lives in North Mississippi.>
Comments
Post a Comment