Stalking Shakespeare

A darkly humorous and spellbinding real-life detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man's relentless search for an authentic, accurate 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 kicked off a decades-long obsession with Shakespearian portraiture. It began with a simple premise: no one has any idea what Shakespeare actually looked like. That he's gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point.

Stalking Shakespeare is Lee's fascinating memoir about an obsession gone awry, the 400-year-old myriad portraits attached to the famous playwright, and Lee's own unrelenting search—via X-ray and infrared technologies—for a lost picture of the bard painted from real life. With each successive season, as Lee becomes better at coercing curators into testing their paintings with spectral technologies, we get a front-row seat to the mindboggling scandals plaguing the various portraits rumored to depict Shakespeare.

Whisking us backwards in time through layers of paint and into the pages of obscure books on the Elizabethans, Lee takes us on his journey from Vermont to Tokyo and back to Vermont, to Mississippi, to DC, and ultimately to London to confront his unwitting adversaries: all those stuffy curators forever protecting the image of the Bard. For his part, Lee is the enemy they didn't know they had—a writer from Mississippi with nothing to lose—the "Dan Brown of English portraiture."

A lively, bizarre, and surprisingly moving blend of history, art fraud, and madness, Stalking Shakespeare is a unique page-turner as entertaining as it is rigorous—that sheds new light on one of history's greatest cultural and literary icons.