Stalking Shakespeare Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“The Master of Shakespeare, by A. W. L. Saunders, after citing many of the above details, hung its hat on those similarities of poetic style while arguing that Greville, a famously amiable patron, had been the master of a long-standing collaboration marketed as “Will Shake-speare,” whose contributing members included Mary Sidney, Tom Nashe, Francis Bacon, Kit Marlowe, George Peele, and Samuel Daniel.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Perhaps it was because Greville’s poetry had a little too much in common with Shakespeare’s? And it wasn’t just me who noticed that. The critic Glynne Wickham once argued that Shakespeare had based his Love’s Labor’s Lost on a play Greville wrote. The Shakespearian Charles Lamb shocked his friends Coleridge and Wordsworth by choosing Greville as the one person from literary history whose ghost he would most like to interrogate. John Baxter observed that Shakespeare and Greville “share remarkably coincidental general intentions.” The sonnet-cycle scholar Martha Foote Crow noted Greville’s poetry “comes nearer to Shakespeare’s philosophical grasp than does the attempt of any other Elizabethan sonneteer.” Lytton Sells wrote, “In variety of tone and topic [Greville’s] Caelica resembles the sonnets of Shakespeare more than any other poet of his time.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“there were pods of surly teenagers camped out in the booths, and who could blame them for being so authentically surly? Their hometown had been turned into an Elizabethan Disney World with their lives spent weaving between moo-cow tourists.”
― 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

“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

“Imprisoned in the Tower, Southampton was in no position to protect anybody. So if Southampton wasn’t protecting Shakespeare, who was? And how, and why?”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Five earls, three barons, and sixteen knights were implicated in the uprising, yet Shakespeare survived that rebellion unremarked upon. He was not summoned before the Star Chamber like Marlowe. He did not have his papers seized or his books burned. He was not punished in any way. Although clearly aligned with the Essex faction, he wasn’t even called as a witness. Who was protecting Shakespeare at this point?”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Five earls, three barons, and sixteen knights were implicated in the uprising, yet Shakespeare survived that rebellion unremarked upon. He was not summoned before the Star Chamber like Marlowe. He did not have his papers seized or his books burned. He was not punished in any way. Although clearly aligned with the Essex faction, he wasn’t even called as a witness. Who was protecting Shakespeare at this point? The”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“On February 7, 1601, about two years before the queen’s death, an uprising against the crown had begun at the Globe Theatre with a treasonous production of Richard II in which Elizabeth was satirized as the incompetent Richard surrounded by villainous counselors. This rebellion, which would march on London the following morning, was led by two fallen favorites, Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex, and Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton. We can’t be sure of their motive in starting this doomed rebellion, but it seems likely these two hyper-educated earls, symbols of the fast-fading English Renaissance, had been attempting to free their aged queen from the grasp of her powerful secretary, Sir Robert Cecil, in order to thwart Cecil’s plan to control the crown upon Elizabeth’s death.”
― 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

“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

“And whenever we have been furnished a fetish,” Twain wrote, “and have been taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and refrain from examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong, that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty and our devotion.”
― 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

“Well, to start, goodbye Stratford-upon-Avon tourist industry and the millions it raked in annually. Goodbye Royal Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Goodbye Stanley Wells and goodbye to some 367 well-imagined yet now highly comical Shakespeare biographies. Goodbye to the reputations of countless red-faced academics. And, last but not least, goodbye to the “I Think Shakespeare Wrote Shakespeare!” T-shirt company.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“First the Folger gobbles up all the would-be bards it can buy, then it partitions them away from the public while refusing to allow researchers to gaze into them via spectral technologies. Why purchase a portrait to hide it? Why not display it, alongside its spectral results, in a museum open to the public?”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“The Folger was either the most or least honest research library in the world.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“the library itself was closed to the general public and that in order to enter the “library library”—as she described it—you had to apply for a scholar’s pass months in advance. Such passes were generally restricted to PhD candidates.”
― 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

“In his article, Barrell had cited a letter by Ketel’s biographer that proved Ketel had indeed painted de Vere. Barrell then pointed out that the Ashbourne had likely resided for decades at Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire, where a 1695 will mentioned a portrait of “the earl of Oxford my wife’s great grand-father at [full] length.” In 1721 that de Vere portrait was again noted by the antiquarian George Vertue, but by 1782 this framed picture had vanished; yet that year’s inventory recorded a new portrait now hung in the main dining hall: an unframed three-quarter-length Will Shakespeare. De Vere full-length with frame disappears, Shakespeare three-quarter-length unframed appears, and all this taking place some thirty-five miles from where the Ashbourne would be discovered. It was hard to fault Barrell’s logic here, I felt, especially since the Folger itself had recorded the Ashbourne as owning no original edges, meaning the picture had been cut down in size at some point.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Everything about the Ashbourne spat in the face of the Stratford everyman myth. How in hell could anyone think, even for a moment, that this sitter had been raised milking cows in some dung-filled barn? “Here is a nobleman,” the portrait sang, and in fact even that dangling glove motif in English portraits had been created to distinguish rank from riffraff: only noblemen posed in that manner. The sitter’s face was ethereal, almost regal, as if he were mulling over a line of iambic pentameter or searching for an elusive rhyme.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Eventually the talk turned to Roland Emmerich’s movie when Charles mentioned that Anonymous would incorporate the same incestuous plotline put forth in his book. I dropped my fork right as Larry shot me a horror-filled glance. We didn’t have to be discreet. Beauclerk knew he was treading on sacred ground. Here the Oxfordians were finally achieving respectability—their tribe had infiltrated academia and even the justices of the Supreme Court had split on whether de Vere wrote Shakespeare—and now this Shakespeare-as-motherfucker movie would be used to ridicule the entire movement.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“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

“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

“Let’s have a glance at Strong’s theory. Okay, the 2nd Earl of Essex, a former court favorite, had been the leader of the failed rebellion against the crown. In Strong’s strange-fantastic scenario, the pregnant Lady Essex, hoping to prevent the beheading of her husband following his arrest, had with great speed commissioned this sexy full-length portrait of herself and sent it to Elizabeth as a plea to spare her husband’s life. Strong made no attempt to explain why Lady Essex, who was famously despised by Elizabeth, would have thought it wise to paint herself as the Virgin Queen’s pregnant twin—the two women didn’t even look alike in real life. We are asked to believe that Lady Essex decided to co-opt the queen’s symbol of the goddess Diana in a nearly nude portrait in which the deer, presumably representing her husband Essex, was being crowned by the queen?”
― 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 tragedy we know today came to us patched together with lines lifted from the works of another playwright, Thomas Middleton. Since Macbeth was not considered one of Shakespeare’s last plays, it’s difficult to explain why the tragedy had to be cobbled together in that manner. Was it possible that Macbeth, due to its bloodthirsty portrayal of Scottish royalty, had been censored by James I? Was Macbeth always the shortest play in the canon, or was its brevity the result of censorship? Could its author have suffered dire consequences as a result of a king’s displeasure, and was that the reason “the Scottish play” had always been associated with bad luck?”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint

“Was it possible, I began to wonder, that somebody had overpainted the portrait to protect it? We’ve already delved into the notion that Shakespeare might have fallen out of favor while alive or recently dead, but we know for a fact that he fell into disgrace when the Puritans gained power in 1653 under Lord Protector Cromwell and declared Shakespeare and his ilk spawn of Satan. After nailing shut the Globe and other such lairs, the Puritans started torching art. Did some Clopton hero disguise the family portrait to protect the poet from these buzzkill iconoclasts? In an 1883 lecture, the collector John Rabone stated as much: “It was suggested that the [Hunt] painting had been obscured in Puritanical times, as many portraits had been, to conceal it, as players then were in ill odour.”
― Lee Durkee, Stalking Shakespeare: A Memoir of Madness, Murder, and My Search for the Poet Beneath the Paint