![]() ![]() ![]() And Shakespeare ad vivum is in many ways a wonderful winter addiction, an unsolvable puzzle that constantly makes you feel as if you are about to conquer it. ![]() During the eighteen years, following a divorce, that I was forced to live in arctic Vermont, I found myself readdicted to this search every winter. For the most part, Shakespeare ad vivum has been a history of artistic con men and starry-eyed scholars. Throughout humanity’s centuries-old search for Shakespeare ad vivum, a picture painted from life-one he sat for, one he paid for-no candidate portrait, however celebrated, has withstood the test of time. Meanwhile a prettier yet Shakespeare, one with Fabio hair and a fly leather doublet, is hoisted aloft by the adoring crowd. Invariably the sagas of these painted poets have been tragic in nature, each in turn girded in gold, basked in bulbs, then whisked upon the shoulders of a scholar’s reputation through London, New York, and Milan… only to find itself a short while later a laughingstock: debunked, denuded, holed up in a seedy motel, and eventually hung upon the wall of some dungeon museum as a curiosity, a cautionary tale, a freak show. You could, after all, crowd the snail-shell Guggenheim with the four-hundred-year parade of counterfeit bards, each one prettier than the last, evolving Will by Will like some Darwinian ascent from the knuckle-dragging Droeshout engraving of 1623 to the superciliously upright Cobbe portrait recently embraced by the town of Stratford. Shakespeare, there are good reasons to be cynical. Regarding the portraits said to depict the late Mr. I’le have his picture in my study at the courte. Prologue: Hideous Shakespeare PROLOGUE Hideous Shakespeare 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.”Ī 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. 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. 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. ![]() 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. That the Bard of Avon has gotten progressively handsomer in modern depictions seems only to reinforce this point. It began with a simple premise: despite the prevalence of popular portraits, no one really knows what Shakespeare looked like. A darkly humorous and spellbinding detective story that chronicles one Mississippi man’s relentless search for an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare.įollowing 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. ![]()
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