American novelist Lee Durkee could not have written his memoir, Stalking Shakespeare, before this point in history. This thoroughly engaging book draws upon Durkee’s two decades of researching online, emailing libraries, and using computer programs to compare facial features of Elizabethan portraiture. His candid and sometimes profane account of that research takes his readers on a colloquially eloquent romp tracking down the real face of William Shakespeare.

Durkee grew up in Mississippi and was living in Vermont at the time of his divorce. He decided to stay put until his son was old enough to attend college, and so for eighteen years Durkee tended bar by night and by day focused on the many likenesses of Shakespeare. Fueling that daily study of Shakespearean faces was an obsessive personality and a lot of alcohol.

When Durkee’s son noticed that all his friends at school had been diagnosed with ADHD and been prescribed Adderall, he felt left out. Before consenting to his son’s request to get diagnosed and be set up with a prescription, Durkee decided to try out that treatment himself. An unscrupulous medical doctor, soon to lose his license, gave Durkee a diagnosis and a prescription. “Like many writers,” Durkee explained, “I enjoyed drugs, always had, love at first sight, Romeo meets Juliet, I suppose I had hopes these amphetamine salts, a type of legal cocaine, might transform me into a Russian novelist while curing me of seasonal depression, the magic pill we’ve all dreamed about.” Maybe so, but it drifts leagues beyond those of us whose only chemical additive is caffeine.

So, always within reach of bottles of Adderall and alcohol, as well as boxes of cherry Pop-Tarts, Durkee spent most of the late twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century fixating over a rogues’ gallery from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He papered his walls with prints of paintings, and he filled his laptop computer with files of jpeg images of them.

His approach was that of an amateur, and he felt free to try his own methods. “Since it seemed obvious Shakespeare had been getting prettier by the century,” he reasoned, “I decided to ignore those boy-toy bards so popular with modern scholars and home in on the more neglected candidate portraits, the wretched-refuse Shakespeares, the homeless, homely, and tempest-tossed mutts nobody wanted to depict our Soul of the Ages.”

Along those lines, Durkee began with Martin Droeshout’s engraving of Shakespeare for the First Folio of 1623. Next came the Chandos portrait, said to be from life. Durkee then proceeded to study the Flower and Cobbe portraits, then the Hunt and Ashbourne portraits, as well as Shakespeare’s memorial bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. He pored over the Archer or Bath portrait, what he called “the most beautiful and yet most greatly abused bard portrait in the Folger Library,” and he pondered possible resemblances in portraits of such Elizabethan worthies as Fulke Greville, John Parker, and Phineas Pett. Happily, Durkee’s book includes ample color and black and white illustrations of the portraits he analyzed.

For years that seemed to him one endless New England winter, he steeped himself in drugs and alcohol and what he dubbed his “police lineup of jostled bards.” Harried by insomnia and haunted by hallucinations, he also explored New Age esoterica. From there he delved deep into Elizabethan enchantment with the occult.

As he barraged learned institutions with detailed email inquiries about various portraits of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Durkee developed a morbid fascination with the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D. C. “I imagined the library holding secret underground staff meetings,” he wrote, “with everyone wearing ocher robes in which they whispered plots to circumvent my query and occasionally broke into Gregorian chant.’

Amidst such fantasies, leading him to suspect the Folger’s executives had sent spies to shadow him and assassins to kill him, Durkee burrowed into the maze of conjectures about Shakespearean authorship. With fewer advocates for Francis Bacon as the real author of Shakespeare’s works, Durkee gravitated towards a network of promoters of Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. As Durkee’s mind swirled deeper into doubts about Shakespeare as author of anything, he conceded, “You can’t write a bestselling biography called I Don’t Know Who the Hell Wrote Shakespeare and Neither Do You.”

During his quest, he cautioned himself against confirmation bias. In any research, it can become easy to find what one wants to find to prove a point one has come to see as axiomatic. Meanwhile, from his compulsive reading about Shakespeare’s world, Durkee acquired a keen sense of what the Elizabethans were like. “Vainglorious, superstitious, and hyper-paranoid,” he summed them up, “they lived among ghosts, demons, poisons, codes, witches, spies, pen names, and plagues.” As folks would say today, “Projection much?”

By the end of this page-turner, what emerges has less to do with Durkee’s awareness of his tendency not to follow the path of reason to the end than it does with what he has overlooked. While his searching for the real portrait of Shakespeare took him from the homely to the handsome, from the Droeshout engraving to the Archer painting, Durkee somehow missed the portrait by Gerard Soest. Admittedly, Soest’s version dates to a generation after Shakespeare lived, but it turns the Chandos portrait into an image of near photographic realism.

What is more, Durkee kept asserting that there was no evidence for this or that claim for Shakespeare’s life or writings. While he often quoted Mark Twain, Durkee’s bibliography omitted books such as Ian Wilson’s Shakespeare: The Evidence (1994).

It seems that by temperament, Durkee needs to find out what stands behind any given surface. His passion for x-rays of oil paintings and his susceptibility to complicated conspiracy theories recalls astronomers in the days before Galileo calculating ever more intricate epicycles. Life is often more mundane, without secret codes embedded everywhere, and truth is inherently simple.

At one point, Durkee referred to the kooky fare in his local New Age bookshop as not as “insane as the born-again Christian cult I’d been raised inside in Mississippi,” and when he described his six-month sojourn in Japan, he mentioned his college-age conversion to Buddhism. While peering into portraits of Shakespeare, Durkee’s book reveals his own profile, that of an intense, honest, muddled man forever seeking what Shakespeare in Coriolanus called “a world elsewhere.”