Lee Durkee > Quotes

“You know what makes you a real Mississippian?" I rant or maybe just scream inwardly while flipping off the Confederate statue trapped in my rearview. "Surviving a Mississippi public education, that's what makes you a goddamn Mississippian. ... If you don't have giant gaps in geography -- entire countries you're unaware of, major religions you don't know exist -- then nope, not a Mississippian. If you had sober teachers who could even spell matriculate then you're from someplace fancy like Alabama.”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“I kept telling myself I should fuck it. I kept saying, ‘Faulkner would fuck that watermelon.’ But I never did.”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“NEVER BLINK YOUR HEADLIGHTS AT A UFO AND OTHER DRIVING TIPS FOR MISSISSIPPIANS”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“museums had just started creating virtual galleries online. These galleries often displayed portraits that had been hidden inside storehouses for decades or even centuries.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Although these V& A experts were correct in doubting me—it wasn’t Sir Charles Blount—I still remember being shaken when a curatorial assistant confided to me that the museum had no desire to identify the sitter because the miniature’s anonymity lent it mystery.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Elizabethan portrait miniature. Usually oval in shape, these tiny paintings were designed to be worn on hats, doublets, or chains often as feudal badges of loyalty. Soldiers sent back miniature ambassadors of themselves to their wives or mistresses so as not to be forgotten (or God forbid cuckolded). Travelers presented them as gifts to hosts, and beauties shipped fetching miniatures of themselves to foreign lands in hopes of becoming royal brides. Elizabeth I once dispatched Hilliard to paint the Duke of Anjou—a man she would nickname her “frog”—to surmise whether he was pretty enough to marry. (Um, no.)”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“After today's cavalcade of meth heads, being with Anna feels like entering a Zen rock garden.”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“Stated simply, nobody had ever unearthed a work of genius with de Vere’s name stamped on it. Nor did we have an ad vivum painted portrait of Edward de Vere, only a seventeenth-century copy of a now lost circa-1575 portrait (artist unknown) that showed the earl posing beneath a wide-brimmed sugarloaf hat. A French cloak of gold braid (a proper dandy changed cloaks three times a day) was thrown over the left shoulder of a gold doublet uniquely tasseled at the wrist. Welbeck Abbey lent this portrait of de Vere to London’s National Portrait Gallery back in 1964, and for as long as I kept tabs on it, that portrait remained hidden inside an NPG storehouse in Wimbledon in spite of great public interest in de Vere. Was the NPG worried that tourists might flock like maenads to this dashing portrait of de Vere instead of ogling over the greatly unbeloved Chandos?”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“In 2002 a visitor to their gallery had to inform them that they owned a portrait of the 3rd Earl of Southampton. So why had the Cobbe family failed for centuries to recognize a portrait of their most celebrated ancestor? Well, they had a good excuse. They thought the sitter was a girl. Apparently the Cobbe clan wasn’t familiar with a sonnet penned about their famously effete ancestor, the one that began “A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted.” God save art from the rich.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“It’s easy to forget that Shakespeare didn’t originally divide his plays into acts or scenes. Those delineations began after his productions migrated to the indoor Blackfrairs Theatre with its crew of ribald child actors. The need to replace candles demanded that breaks be inserted into the plays, and the rest, for better or worse, was structural history.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“No, all that mattered was somebody with the correct degree had published a paper in an academic journal that made everybody else feel better about Will Shakespeare. That done, the gavel came clapping down as the Ashbourne portrait was declared innocent on all charges of depicting Edward de Vere.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“But it wasn’t just Twain and Whitman whispering heresies into my ear, a whole ink spill of geniuses had staked their reputations on the argument that “Will Shake-speare” was one of the hyphenated pen names popular among Elizabethan satirists who didn’t fancy being disemboweled in public. The list of gadflies who questioned the official narrative of Shakespeare included Chaplin, Coleridge, Emerson, Gielgud, Hardy, Holmes, Jacobi, James, Joyce, Welles, and of late even Mark Rylance, the first artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Collectively they believed the Stratford businessman to be a front and a fraud. Whatever the truth, it’s fair to say the authorship debate had long been divided into two camps, artists vs. academics.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Wait, I thought. First de Vere and now Mary Sidney? That made two contenders for the title of Shakespeare who stood publicly accused of having fucked horses. What would Sherlock Holmes have made of such a clue?”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Only a portion of the Folger collection was on display—if display is the right word for a museum closed to the general public—”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“You can’t write a bestselling biography called I Don’t Know Who the Hell Wrote Shakespeare and Neither Do You nor can you print up a sellable T-shirt or coffee mug on that theme. But it’s the truth, you don’t know, and neither do you, or you, or you, but as a culture we won’t admit we don’t know who wrote Shakespeare. We desperately want to know. But we don’t. And likely never will.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“A few years after the Janssen portrait was debunked by the Folger, the owner of the Cobbe picture scheduled his own restoration—which he decided to do himself—and dissolved a layer of surface paint on his portrait that had possibly been applied, according to Wells, while Shakespeare was still alive. Yet nobody criticized Alec Cobbe for destroying that layer of ancient paint—or for refusing to release some of his portrait’s test results to the public. All that mattered, it seemed, was that our new Soul of the Ages looked like a Calvin Klein underwear model.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Far more interesting to me was Greenblatt’s list of every class that had been denied young Will in this hypothetical school experience: “no English history or literature; no biology, chemistry, or physics; no economics or sociology; only a smattering of arithmetic… all backed up by the threat of violence.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“The Flower’s greatest champion, when all was said and done, would prove to be the German professor Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel, the same scholar who put forth the theory the Droeshout might have been copied from a death mask. In 2002 Hammerschmidt-Hummel had just completed a six-year research project with the German FBI and a Justice League team of scientists that attempted to employ crime-solving facial-recognition technology to establish the consistencies of facial features within a select number of accepted images of William Shakespeare. Her study would eventually lead her to make some interesting accusations, one of which involved portrait switchery.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“The Droeshout engraving appeared seven years after Shakespeare’s death inside the 1623 First Folio, a collection of his plays without which some of those masterpieces would have perished. In the folio’s opening page the playwright Ben Jonson, a friend and rival of Shakespeare’s, approved this engraving of the author inside a poem in which Jonson lamented that the engraver, a twenty-two-year-old artist named Martin Droeshout, had been unable to capture Shakespeare’s wit as well as he had his face. To my knowledge that face has not been complimented since.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“The traditional academics, the powerful white men Twain referred to as “thugs,” had simply ignored her findings, which made me wonder if there were even a path to victory here. Could anyone ever hope to rouse the public into questioning the accepted history of an icon like Will Shakespeare?”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Few crimes were considered more scurrilous than suicide, as in Sonnet 66 (“ Tired with all these, for restful death I cry”), as in: Cassius, Brutus, Portia, Romeo, Juliet, Othello, Ophelia, Lady Macbeth, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, Charmian, Goneril, and Eros. During Shakespeare’s life, suicide was considered an act of murder against God, Nature, and King, a trinity of stigmas so severe that even a nobleman who offed himself would have his assets seized. Only one man in England had a samurai approach to the art of self-destruction, and that was Shakespeare himself, who seemed to admire it under certain circumstances.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Were my murderous theories really that insane? Hadn’t Marlowe been stabbed dead by intelligencers involved in that same succession intrigue? Hadn’t Ben Jonson been imprisoned for his satiric plays? And didn’t Tom Nashe flee London in fear of his life? Was it really that farfetched to believe that Shakespeare, who had ridiculed all the power players of his day, and whose play Richard II once helped instigate an armed rebellion against the crown, might have gotten himself murdered? And if Shakespeare were murdered, and if the crown had passed to James instead of to a proper Tudor heir, then at what point in our history of horror begetting horror would the royal family have stopped covering up those sordid facts and fessed up to not only having murdered the greatest artists of all time but to stealing the crown of England from the rightful heir to the throne? Never. They would never admit it. The cover-up would last forever.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Back in 1988 the Folger had X-rayed their Janssen portrait before recasting their star bard into the less enviable role of Sir Thomas Overbury, Disagreeable Jacobean Courtier Poisoned with Tarts and Jellies by the Wife of his Homosexual Lover. In questioning the authenticity of the Cobbe gallant, the skeptics were asking an obvious question: How could this Cobbe “original” depict Shakespeare if its Janssen “copy” depicted Tom Overbury? Even Stanley Wells agreed the two portraits portrayed the same man, but it was his contention that the Folger had erred in debunking and thereby devaluing their prized Janssen Shakespeare. Wells believed both portraits depicted Shakespeare and was quick to point out the Cobbe had been found in a collection descended from the 3rd Earl of Southampton (the consensus Fair Youth of the sonnets)”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Hammerschmidt-Hummel cried foul play, and it’s interesting to observe how the scholarly world reacted to a respected professor’s accusations against London’s vaulted curatorial world. Her evidence that the portrait had been switched continued to be ignored; instead, certain scholars went schoolyard on the professor. Professor Stanley Wells, as quoted in The Times, even described Hammerschmidt-Hummel’s claim as “disgraceful” and added that many books written on Shakespeare contained similar “lunatic theories.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“the 1601 Essex Rebellion, an armed uprising against the crown that was started at the Globe Theatre with an illicit production of Richard II. The rebellion ended with five courtiers being beheaded and the Fair Youth Earl of Southampton tossed into the Tower. If Strong was correct, that connection to treason might help explain why the picture had been repeatedly altered in strange fantastic ways while residing inside the Royal Collection.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“The emptiness of that monument in front of me was another reason the locals thought Greville wrote Shakespeare. Inside the First Folio, Ben Jonson had called Shakespeare “a monument without a tombe,” and here was just such a monument. Jonson had also described Shakespeare as the “Sweet Swan of Avon.” Greville’s heraldic beast was the swan—he’d even worn a swan-topped helmet into the tilts—and Warwick Castle, where Greville had been living when the First Folio was published, was perched directly over the Avon River.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“In 1834 William IV, England’s “sailor king,” had obtained the portrait, understood to be Shakespeare, from the descendants of the Sidney clan at Penshurst Place. Could there be a better provenance for Shakespeare than Penshurst? The Sidney family was, after all, the only family ever rumored to have had “the man Shakespeare” pay them a social visit. Mary Sidney even stood accused of having written, or coauthored, the plays of Shakespeare due in part to the elite literary salon she fostered known as the Wilton Circle. Mary’s husband had founded Pembroke’s Men, the first acting troupe to perform Shakespeare’s plays. The hallowed 1623 First Folio was dedicated to their two sons.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“All Gotama [the Buddha] taught, it said, was a technique, the world's most logical way to reset your thought patterns in order to make you incredibly mellow and super chill, like Mr. Spock after pon farr.”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“I've done everything from helping old people to pee to taking out their garbage to chasing their escaped pets. We are the poor man's ambulance, and we are also, sad to say, the poor man's priest, our cab the confessional in which people litmus-test their wildest fears and prejudices.”
― Lee Durkee, The Last Taxi Driver

“Harvard’s Leslie Hotson had written a book arguing that this miniature depicted William Shakespeare. Bear in mind, this was the same professor who had famously unearthed documents proving the playwright Christopher Marlowe to have been stabbed in the eye not by a stiffed barkeep or “lewd love” but by royal intelligencers.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint