As the long Vermont winters continue, Durkee finds himself strung out on alcohol and drugs, stumbling out into ice storms that reframe nature into a gallery of looming misshapen animal faces, which he dubs “sendaks,” reminding him of “Where the Wild Things Are.” This generalized paranoia, presented disarmingly straight, is eventually localized into an almost psychotic animus toward various Shakespeare institutions, which refuse to respond to his research requests expressed in letters, calls, emails and eventually in-person trips.
The Folger Shakespeare Library and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust become his principal dragons to slay. His feeling for the occasional highhandedness and secrecy of these institutions is acute and true; his exaggeration of their perfidy and C.I.A.-like reach is richly comical.
And then, alas, and oh what a falling off is there, Durkee tumbles down the manhole that gapes wide for anyone with a conspiracy-led view of history: He falls prey to authorship twaddle. Having headed home to Mississippi, and having replaced Adderall with a greater quantity of booze, he moves from the vagaries of portraiture to the supposed unknowability of authorship. Though initially skeptic, he is soon seduced by spectral impostors. All the old skeletons, clothed in tatters of rotting silk, spill out of the closet — Marlowe, Fulke Greville, Mary Sidney and a lot of the Earl of Oxford.
Up until this point, Durkee’s insights have seemed piercing and judicious, so it is strange that when diving into the idea of authorship, he dances past fact after fact not to his liking, sidestepping the copious evidence that Shakespeare was Shakespeare with a Trumpian-Johnsonian shimmy. That his path toward confusion is given supposed historical validity by Edward de Vere’s propensity to pop up at séances, sometimes expressing himself in dazzling sonnets, doesn’t seem to worry him. Soon after, we are chuting down conspiracy wormholes, which include theorizing about possible assassinations carried out by the Shakespeare Industry on pedophile picture restorers. Yes, it gets that crazy.
At one moment Durkee tells us, “One of the Buddha’s earliest teachings warned us that we view our world incorrectly because of the human tendency to wrap everything we perceive inside cultural concepts,” urging us to resist enshrouding Shakespeare thus. Conspiracy, with all its tentacles, must be one of the most enticing and overpowering cultural concepts of the present age, and it would be sweet if Durkee, and many others, swerved its distortions with the same enthusiasm they swerve others.
