Stalking Shakespeare

A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

By: Lee Durkee

Narrated by: Matt Godfrey

*Winner of the 2024 Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award for Life Writing*

“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.

Critic reviews

"Matt Godfrey’s voice is friendly but with a ragged edge — a perfect choice to deliver this tequila-, Pop-Tart-, sake-, and Adderall-fueled trip down the rabbit hole of Shakespeare’s life and legacy. This is a true saga of the author’s unconventional, obsessive, and exhaustive search to discover Shakespeare’s “true” portrait and identity. Godfrey masterfully delivers the author’s wry asides and humorous tone as he uncovers the many lies, fakes, and conspiracies surrounding Shakespeare and his portraits. Even if you can’t follow all the intrigues and complexities of the art world, painting restorations, and Elizabethan court life, Godfrey is like an eccentric friend who will drag you along for the ride. Who knew that the world of Elizabethan portraiture could be so entertaining?"

Entertaining

A wonderfully entertaining and illuminating account of the various portraits that have been put forth as depicting Shakespeare, and a thorough exploration of the various theories about the authorship of the work reputed to be Shakespeare’s. The book also provides fascinating sketches of a host of Elizabethan figures, modern and historical scholars, and those from the different schools of thought on the real Shakespeare. The part that is memoir takes a reader along with the author as he goes “down the rabbit hole” in his search for the real Shakespeare.

Wow

The word choice by Lee Durkee, is phenom, every sentence contains a little bit of joy. The narrator Matt GodFreid is likely the most interesting person I've ever heard. Is nation and pronunciation. Well done.

A strangely wandering tale of personal difficulties and research into the Shakespearean authorship question.

The author leaps to several contested authorship conclusions. While I admire his tenacity in his research the books structure is muddled.

No thanks.

Self-indulgent narrative which seems to draw no conclusions at the end. I am disappointed in this book.