The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint by Lee Durkee

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint by Lee Durkee https://amzn.to/42VgEF8 A darkly humorous and spellbinding 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. 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.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm host Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big show, my family and friends. We certainly appreciate you guys coming in and being a part of the show. Thanks for tuning in, as always.

We really appreciate you. We've got an amazing author on the show today. We're going to be talking about his newest book about Shakespeare. And so we're going to be talking some Shakespearean language here. I am trying to pull Shakespeare jokes. Oh, Horatio, I knew him well. Was it Horatio? No, it. Well, was there Horatio? No, it wasn't.

It was some other guy. Wasn't it? Anyway, we're going to be doing some Shakespearean stuff on the show. I feel like I should be talking in Shakespearean speak, but, uh, I know of none. I don't know what that means. Anyway, guys, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Make them feel guilty that they're not being as educated as you are because God knows that joining the Chris Voss Show and listening to it

is kind of like a mini cult MLM religion, but not. There's no taxes. There's no tithing. There's no suicide things you have to participate in or blood rituals. It's just kind of a fun thing to listen to and laugh to and become smarter. So, therefore, refer the show to your family, friends, and relatives. Goodreads.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, youtube.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, and linkedin.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss. And the videos are starting to take off over there on TikTok. Go to Chris Voss 1 on TikTok and the Chris Voss show on TikTok.

We're trying to be cool, which is not working out no i'm kidding actually the videos are doing really well uh so go check all that over there folks but remember even though we're not an mlm you need to have five friends and relatives in your downline you're for the show too no i'm just kidding there's no requirement for that i'm just guilting and shaming you for whatever grift i can get off it uh today our amazing author has written the latest book that just came out April 18th, 2023. The book is entitled Stalking Shakespeare, a memoir of madness, murder, and my search for the poet beneath the paint. Wait, is this a book about me? Anyway, Lee Durkee is on the show with us today.

He's going to be talking to us about his amazing book. He is the author of the latest memoir uh described by the new york times as wickedly entertaining oh this is stuff we love on the show wicked entertainment uh which you can also find is the name of my only fans uh no i'm just kidding people uh it's about his 20-year obsession he should seek help with trying to find lost portraits of William Shakespeare. His novel, The Last Taxi Driver, was named the best book of 2020 in Ireland, France, and America. Does anybody care about Ireland? No, I'm just kidding.

That's a wonderful thing to get. Ireland's a wonderful country. Oh, I just lost all two people that are over there drinking. And his stories about essays have appeared in Harper's Magazine, The Sun, Oxford American Zoetrope, Garden and Gun, Tin House, and Mississippi Noir. He lives in North Mississippi. We won't hold that against him. Welcome to the show, Lee. How are you? I'm happy to be here, Chris, and I'm doing well so far. There you go. And I'm just kidding about North Mississippi. It's a wonderful place. I've never been there. You know, Mississippi will conform to a lot of stereotypes, I have to admit,

but it's a little bit different than you expect as well. There you go. Yeah, I'm in the middle of the field in North Mississippi right now in a cabin as stereotypical as you could imagine. Wow. Do you have those beautiful trees and the kind of bogs that are there that I've seen in the pictures? I've got a lot of hummingbirds and just like a delta-like field of flatness surrounding me.

Oh, well. It's a beautiful countryside. Yeah. Yeah. As long as you stay away from anybody who, you know, looks like they're from the movie Deliverance, you're okay, I think. It's hard to do that here because you know we inspired those people those characters are probably cast from mississippi well i think you have to go to arkansas to get that anyway now that we've uh alienated all two arkansas uh uh listeners uh i i don't think they

have internet out there do they no i'm just kidding i love my arkansasianians sinians whatever uh so let's get to your book. Uh, well, give me a.com, give me a.com, uh, of where people can find you on the interwebs. Uh,

Lee Durkee.com is the easiest place to go. Um, you can also go visit my blog at, um, it's called curious portraits of dead Elizabethans. It was kind of the Genesis of this book was an addiction to the blog and it's still up after God knows how many years and reincarnations um and i'm on well i just got off twitter um but i'm still on instagram and where i'm famous as a hummingbird feeder not as a writer oh yeah

i get a lot of hummingbirds and um someday i hope to be as famous a writer as i am a hummingbird gatherer well there you go you got your book out this is your first no this is your second book correct third book first one was first one was published in 2000 got rave reviews and then i went 20 years before i published another book so i would been in the wilderness a long time well it's a good thing you didn't wait another 20 years to get your third book out. So give us the 30,000-foot overview of your newest book, Stalking Shakespeare. Well, I had a good Shakespeare professor as an undergraduate at, guess it, Arkansas.

And he got me inspired to learn about the Elizabethans. At some point, I wanted to put faces to names, and I started taking home books of portraits. And I realized that most of these courtiers were unidentified. So I took up the strange 19th century hobby of learning how to identify unidentified courtiers and portraits. And this, in turn, led me to Shakespeare and that rabbit hole. And once I started investigating Shakespeare's portraits, I just started hopping scandal to scandal to scandal. Every portrait associated with Shakespeare said to be Shakespeare painted from life, which is mired in some curatorial scandal involving portrait switchery, strange, inexplicable behavior, and even murder.

And so I became hooked, addicted, obsessed with finding the first, to be the first person to find a portrait of Shakespeare painted from life. Wow. Now you have on the cover of your book what I think most people think of when they think of a portrait of Shakespeare. And it's kind of scraped. So tell us about that. Well, that is a rendering of the Drew shoot engraving made from, that was in Shakespeare's 1623 first folio, which is the sacred book that stopped so many of his, it's his collected plays, and it deified Shakespeare. And the engraving was the only

bona fide, we know, vouched for portrait of Shakespeare, and it made him less than handsome. And so a search was on, it was assumed that this engraving was made from a portrait painted from life. And so for 400 years, people have been searching for this portrait. And I joined that search. But I concentrated on the uglier portraits that had been neglected because the Drew Chute engraving was far from handsome. He had bug eyes and a giant forehead and he he looked diseased and uh he didn't look healthy at all so i concentrated on the uglier portraits figuring shakespeare was getting more beautiful by the decade and these other portraits the homely shakespeares were being neglected hi voksters foz here with a little station break hope you're enjoying the show so far we'll resume

here in a second uh i'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com. Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, and be sure to check out chrisfossleadershipinstitute.com. Now back to the show. Yeah, like what's going on?

That's, you know, maybe you just got a maybe you just got some uh bad light that day or maybe they got his uh his bad side of his face i that's it's one thing i learned in hollywood being you know from my friend brad pitt who calls me all the time for tips on how to look so ridiculously good looking um is you have to have your you have to use the right you know whatever's the best side of your face. I don't know what that means. So now it's billed as a darkly humorous and spellbinding detective story that chronicles your search for an authentic portrait of William Shakespeare. But there's something deeper about the story. Kind of give us a little bit of your origin story and how you got on this pathway to where,

you know, Shakespeare needs to get a restraining order from you, for you? Okay, yes. Well, I got married suddenly and moved to Vermont and then was divorced even more suddenly. Now, did she divorce you because you were a little obsessed with Shakespeare and not her? No, this was pre-Shakespeare. She had other reasons, equally valid. All right, I'll just make it short. But the important thing was that I was divorced, not why.

And I found myself as a misplaced Mississippian having to spend the next 18 years until my son was ready to go to college or not, stuck in Vermont and dealing with seasonal depression. I did not embrace winter in any way. I stayed indoors. And that's when I got addicted to this search for Shakespeare, because right at that point, the internet was coming to life. And suddenly there were these online galleries that gave us these portraits that had been hidden in storage containers for centuries. Nobody had seen them before. And suddenly everybody had access to them. So I

knew I had a huge advantage over anybody else in terms of finding a legitimate portrait of Shakespeare just due to technology. And there were other technologies I embraced, such as getting curators to x-ray and infrared portraits so we can see their entire histories. We can see everything that's been censored. We can see the carbon underdrawings, et cetera. And I became very good at getting curators to spend a lot of money to test their so-called Shakespeare portraits. Wow. And, I mean, I guess, why is it so hard to find an accurate picture of them? Why is it so hard to find an accurate picture of him?

Why is it so hard? Well, because they keep getting debunked. I mean, there are always this portrait being offered up every decade, every century. It has a reign of a half-life, and this is Shakespeare painted from life. And everybody believes it and embraces it, and then it will be debunked. And sometimes the debunking is fascinating and scandal filled but the debunking nevertheless takes hold and a new portrait even more handsome is suddenly presented to us the same process repeats itself Shakespeare gets

handsomer and handsomer I don't know if you've seen the most recent portrait of Shakespeare embraced by the Stratford Birthplace Trust but but he looks like a soap opera doctor now. And, you know, I call him Spongebob Shakespeare. And that's what people want. I mean, I'm old enough. I remember when musicians were ugly. But our culture wants handsome artists now. That's true.

Yeah. And as a writer, that's horrifying because there's this youth cult tied in with MFA programs. And all they want is young, young, beautiful authors on jacket photos. And the same goes for Shakespeare portraits. They want beautiful Shakespeare. I was having an argument with somebody the other day,

I believe it was my mom. And she was like, you really need to add your portrait to the back of the book and i've been losing a lot of weight i've lost a hundred pounds or so and uh uh i i've still have more to lose and i'm like mom i i have radio face that's why i do a podcast because i have radio face and uh i'm like i i don't want to scare people away from buying my book but maybe i'm hoping that someone will do a revision like you just mentioned to me and my face in the future where they'll be like hey we should get somebody out to fix this ugly old man

it'll help move product i bet you know yeah it's certainly what publishers want it will help me on tiktok too because i see what i'm competing with over there and it's really about the image that you make over there so there you go so i mean this this becomes like a whole obsessive journey that's decades long for you like uh it's almost like uh becomes an obsession hobby how many different paintings or pictures did you go through to try and find this or were you able to count i don't think i could count the problem with the book was narrowing it down um if you go to my blog which you know curious portraits of dead elizabethans you'll see that the the portraits i've explored are endless um and psychotic um and there are so many of them and i was was discovering, you know, portraits I was hoping were lost portraits of Shakespeare. And I explore those as well. So certain portraits lend themselves to the book

better than others. You know, if you have a lot of side-by-side comparison or video animations, you can't use that in books. So you have to cut those no matter how much you love that portrait or enamored with it. It doesn't make the cut for the book. A certain type of portrait that can be logically argued comes to the forefront when you're selecting which ones go into the book. Now, couldn't you just check Shakespeare's Instagram account? A lot of people take selfies on their Instagram account. That has not crossed my mind. It would have saved me a lot of trouble had I thought of that and if that works.

He probably does have an Instagram account, I assume. Well, I mean, doesn't everybody? I don't know. Welcome to 2023 in Gen Z. So this is very interesting. Tell us about the places you go, because you went around the world, it seems, to hunt these down. Tell us about that journey. Well, the book starts in Vermont, which is really the genesis of it. Seasonal depression and the great comedy that comes out of it, the desire for oblivion and suicide. It's always been fodder for me for comic writing.

When I leave Vermont, I go on a visiting artist fellowship for seven months to Tokyo. And there I encounter broadband internet for the first time. And I use the broadband internet to basically steal portraits offline and collect files on different portraits, because the most difficult thing you're up against in this endeavor is finding high resolution photographs, which are guarded religiously by museums and institutions in Great Britain. So it's no easy task to get a good photograph

of a portrait you're interested in. And I stayed in Japan and had a wonderful time, fell in love with the culture. And I write about that. It's one of my favorite parts of the book. After that, I go to Mississippi, which I fled Vermont during my 18th winter. i couldn't stay there another moment i love vermont i admire it the people there are amazing people so much to admire about them but they don't get your jokes they're very literal minded and um the weather is just too brutal so that explains that bernie guy yeah yeah he used to be a regular customer of my customer of my clothing story oh yeah he always he bark at you about the one percent

the one percent well he's been doing that forever hasn't he hasn't changed his tune much he um he helped me get a friend of mine out of prison in katmandu well i didn't have to do that yeah so hats off to him for that right and um and um i fled vermont back to mississippi um back to oxford mississippi which is not my hometown i'm from hattiesburg which you've never heard of and nobody else has but um um from there i ranged out to the vulgar shakespeare library in washington. to explore. They have the largest collection gaggle of Shakespeare portraits in the world, I assume. And they also have a trustee statement saying that none of these portraits will be X-rayed unless there's a public outcry to do so. And so the Volger Shakespeare Library is an amazing facility.

I love it. They've been very kind to me, but I've been battling them for many years now to X-ray their portraits, and they just won't do it. So it's frustrating. And there's a very controversial portrait there called the Ashburn Portrait, which their behavior with has been somewhat questionable. I write about it in depth in my book. And a lot of time, I spent about it in depth in my book and, and, um, a lot of time, I spent a lot of time in DC. And then I finally, eventually towards the end of the book, go to England and visit all these portraits I've been looking at online all for

the last two decades. Oh, wow. So I'm looking at the Ashbourne portrait and, uh, some of the history behind it. Now, what does the X-raying the portrait do? What does that do when they do that? What's the purpose of it? If you imagine, I'm going to say this without pontificating, but if you imagine a book, say a book of Macbeth, and you can look into that book, and you can see all the drafts that led up to the final product,

and you can also see everything that's been censored from that book in an age of censorship. It gives you an idea of what spectral technologies allow us to do with portraits. When you X-ray or infrared a portrait, you get different effects. If you infrared a portrait, it gets absorbed by the carbon underdrawing. So you get to see the actual first draft sketch if such a sketch exists, which to me is fascinating. X-rays allow you to see under portraits. They allow you to see what's been touched up, sometimes what's been censored.

You can see what's underneath the paint unless it's been overpainted with a lead-heavy paint, in which case you can't get underneath the paint, which can be very frustrating. So you can see every draft. You can divide the portrait and see its entire history through these x-rays, infrareds, pigment analysis, ultraviolet examination, dintrochronology. You can see how old the panel was that it was painted on. Most of these portraits were painted on panels, not canvases. So it's almost limitless. And I'm sure since I was writing these books that the technologies have graduated and moved on well beyond my comprehension. There you go. So does it do any damage to the thing?

Why are they usually resistant to having their... It shouldn't. No, the resistance is financial. But I think the resistance also has to do with underfunded museums quite often. But I think there's also a protective aura around Shakespeare in England. Nobody really wants you looking beneath the paint of Shakespeare. I did have, I talked one curator into x-raying a portrait.

He promised me he would, I guess he experienced difficulties getting that done because it can cost thousands of dollars to just transport a portrait that's 400 years oh yeah insurance and all that and what he did and i'm not going to name names because he should not have done this but he took it down to a local clinic and had them x-rayed there i couldn't believe it when he sent me the x-ray it was completely unprofessional and it was just a with a clinic everywhere. Showed a bunch of bones and a kidney.

Yeah. And I'd waited years for that x-ray. And it was just so disappointing to get this shoddy x-ray that didn't show anything after years of waiting. But that's part of the book, too, is anticlimactic results are part of it. And part of the depression too it is part of the fear maybe on some of these uh organizations that the painting might get debunked and therefore the painting would lose value or you know people would think so and i think i think that's obviously the case in some portraits uh but then again when you have the vulture shakespeare library they've debunked

their two most valuable Shakespeare portraits. Wow. So go figure. You know, they're either how to make sense of that. That seems to defy logic. But they have done that either to their credit or not, because one of the debunkings was highly controversial. And the other one still has advocates that disagree with them. But for the most part they don't

want you looking into Shakespeare and um and nobody wants to be the pariah who raises the wrong questions about Shakespeare in England it's not career ending but it doesn't really help you I don't think and anyway curators curators don't have the time or energy to be passionate or obsessive about one portrait but evidently you were yeah but i'm not the head of the orphanage and they are the curators are in charge of the entire orphanage they have all these charges whereas i can obsess on one portrait for a year and then obsess on another portrait for two years and they da da da da they don't they don't have that luxury so i have a lot of sympathy to them and um they all hate me

and i have sympathy for that too i completely take up too much of their time i pester them with questions endlessly um and when i began i was a complete idiot at this and the questions i asked were idiotic, therefore. And, you know, over the years, I got better and better at it. And I became expert at costume dating and things like that. But it took me a while, a long time to win over the confidence of any curators. And fair enough, they're overworked and they had better things to do than to respond to a cab driver in Mississippi. There you go.

Well, there's some controversies around shakespeare we had uh michael blanding on the show years ago he wrote a book north by shakespeare maybe it was oh really and and uh there's some claiming that maybe there was a bard who wrote most of shakespeare's work and uh shakespeare regurgitated some of it or reworked it or re-put a thing on it. Right, right, yeah. Have you heard about that? Yeah, I read that book. Oh, did you?

Yeah. We had him on the, well, we had the, I think in the New York Times or Washington Post author who wrote the book about the original data that was done. And man, he said the hate that he got from you know you mentioned earlier the uh scholars and stuff that back up shakespeare he got a lot of hate i think he got some death threats too like they he pissed off uh the wrong crowd which is kind of weird because normally you have to go on youtube or twit tiktok to do that there is a there's a lot of anger associated with shakespeare and what's odd is it comes from people who have nothing invested in Shakespeare.

They don't read him. They don't pursue his films or plays. And yet they vehemently do not want to hear anybody question his identity, which is an odd reaction. Maybe the problem is it's just too soon. I think that's changing though. I think that's changing pretty rapidly as one generation of white male scholars is being replaced by scholars who are neither white nor male. And they have a very different agenda and a way of looking at things. And I think the circle of white male, alpha male surrounding the Shakespeare myth is about to

come down and things are already changing drastically. So, um, it'll be fascinating to see how it evolves. I'm a neutral, I'm a neutral. I'm not against the authorship debate. I find it fascinating, but I don't see any smoking guns. I think it's still a debate. I think so much is still check. Yeah, debate's fun. I think someone should still check his Instagram account because, I mean, the truth might be there. Unless he's got pronouns, you know, you never know. I don't know what that means.

So this has been pretty insightful. It's billed as a fun read, darkly humorous and spellbinding detective story. And it's interesting, all the stuff that goes into some of these little portraits, 400-year-old portraits and trying to nail them down. Anything more you want to tease out of the book before we go? Well, I'd just like to emphasize that it is a fun read. It's not self-serious.

It's not scholarly. Andious. It's not scholarly. And what it does is punch up. It punches up at institutions and scholars who have been knighted. And it tries to bring a little humility to history, I would argue, that we are not all knowing when it comes to Shakespeare and that it's fair to question who he is and what he looked like. Um, I, in writing it, I took the role of the fool and the fool punches up. And as long as he makes the King laugh,

as long as he makes the King think the fool doesn't get beheaded. There you go. As long as he doesn't get beheaded. Right. Right. You mentioned the review in the New York Times earlier. Now, half of my book or a good portion of my book is ridiculing the Shakespeare tourist industry. Oh.

Yeah. So who do they give my book to review in the New York Times? Oh. The artistic director of the Globe Theater, right? Wow. Had I known, I would have changed my name and dove underwater for 20 years but he loved it because i made him laugh right and i made him you know bad news or good news it's all good pr and bad pr it's all good pr this is what sometimes what some people say that's what they

say but so far it's been all good uh we've got the the times on our side and the washington post i thought they were going to crucify me because I make fun of the Volger Shakespeare library. But they loved it even more than the Times did. So it's a fun read is what I'll emphasize again. And I promise you, you'll never look at Shakespeare the same way again if you read this book. There you go. Well, that's the most fun thing. And it's good to same way. Again, if you read this book, there you go. Well, that's,

that's the most fun thing. And it's good to debate these things. We need a, we need an environment that debates and questions and, you know, what ifs and stuff and comedy, of course, needs to make a comeback. It seems like people take everything a little too seriously and their

feelings. They're always getting their feelings hurt. And really comedy is such a great way to, to really kind of look at some of the fallacies and issues that human beings have. And it's kind of a nice mirror that goes, hey, maybe we're not as perfect as we think we are. At least some people think they are.

So there you go. Thanks for coming on the show, Lee. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. LeeDurkey.com. MossShakespearePortraits.com. That's the only places you can find me as of now besides instagram and um facebook of course because i'm not i'm that old there you go get on uh tiktok and uh make people uh go off over there they love doing that if i do go on tiktok it's just going to be with my hummingbird videos and um yeah i'm already dominating instagram with them so i really don't feel the need

you know you can do i'm thrilled to be off twitter now because that's just too traumatic yeah it's it's kind of gone down it's been downhill for i don't know 10 years but now it's really off the rails uh and i understand it's gonna get worse um it's just it's a trollville you know youtube turned into trollville years ago i'm surprised lately i've got a lot of positive comments on my video and it seems to have turned a corner uh but it used to be just people that was just trollville for sport but uh um yeah what are you gonna do uh you know what you should do you know it'd be really funny You could do like a PR video, and you could make like a fake painting of Shakespeare.

Like don't do the real ones, unless you got good insurance and lawyers. But you know, you could get like a fake painting, and you'd be like, hey, you know what I do with my book? I poke holes in pictures of Shakespeare. And you could do the whole Steve Wynn thing that he did once, and jam pens into photos and pictures. in pictures of Shakespeare and you can do the whole Steve Wynn thing that he did once, uh, and jam pens into,

into photos and pictures. Yeah. If you're right about that, no one gets that reference. They'll have to Google it. Uh, so anyway, Lee, just some ideas there for you on the Tik TOK.

Uh, thank you very much for coming on the show, man. We really appreciate it. Thank you, Chris. It was a pleasure being here. Have fun.

There you go. Thanks for tuning into my audience. Go to goodreads.com for just Chris Voss. You was a pleasure being here. Have fun. There you go. Thanks for tuning in to my audience. Go to goodreads.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss. You can see all the brilliant authors over there, plus the Chris Voss Show ports all of its podcast episodes there. You can go see us on linkedin.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss. YouTube.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss.

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