Should you answer a fool according to his folly? This question haunts the pages of an erudite new book. Peter K. Andersson, a historian at Örebro University in Sweden, has written a short and delightful account of William Somer, fool to Henry VIII and one of the best-known individuals in Tudor England. Somer was the man with whom the king “spent perhaps more time than any other,” a subject in four royal portraits, and a witness of Elizabeth I’s coronation. He was regarded as a comic genius by William Shakespeare and was remembered in a sequence of seventeenth-century jestbooks and plays. His occasional appearances have continued into Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror & the Light (2020). Somer defined the archetype of the fool and became a recognizable figure in his lifetime and beyond. Yet, for all of his visibility, even celebrity, he remains “one of the most mysterious individuals” in early modern England.

Andersson’s new book sets out to situate Somer within these changing contexts. He is not the first to have made this attempt. Over the last four centuries, a handful of authors have reconstructed Somer’s life, with results that include a mid-seventeenth-century memoir and an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. But the subject is challenging. The materials for a fuller life history simply do not exist. We lack basic information about Somer’s birth and death, about his career before his appearance in Henry’s court, and about what his life as royal entertainer might have meant. The closest we come to his own speech is in secondhand reporting of celebrated quips, sometimes recorded for the first time several decades after his death. And so Andersson accepts that his book is “not a conventional biography.” But he revels in the opportunities that this admission permits. Taking cues from Natalie Zemon Davis, and inspired by her careful reading of historical silences and omissions, Andersson shows how Somer was represented and remembered by those who knew him best—and by others who never knew him at all.

Where did Somer come from? Andersson works hard to create a plausible backstory. He describes how the dissolution of the monasteries that Henry promoted as part of his program of religious reform shattered some of the most important institutions for providing social care. Whatever their other achievements, monasteries gave a home to those who could not easily integrate into everyday life. In the 1530s, the records of those who were auditing these institutions with a view to reassigning their land and wealth noted the homes they customarily provided for the needy. Some of these men and women were, in the language of the day, “natural fools”—individuals who might now be recognized as having some form of mental or physical disability. In the sixteenth century, however, disability could lead to opportunity. Some of these individuals, Andersson suggests, might have been talent-spotted for a new career as royal entertainer.

So what did it mean for Somer to move to London and take up his new life as a royal fool? Well, Andersson explains, we can forget familiar images of jesters dressed in motley, toying with juggling balls and baubles. That idea developed in the later seventeenth century, a faux-retro trend that was part of the “sentimental image of merry old England.” But in the sixteenth century, fools were of a very different sort. The evidence of the royal portraits is confirmed by court accounts: Somer was dressed in green and festooned with buttons, sporting closely cropped hair and no beard. Yet his role was riven with contradictions. He was at the center of Henry’s court but without any kind of accommodation. His job was to entertain, but he was rarely in front of an audience. He was clearly a man but was dressed to look like a child. He could speak freely to the king but routinely slept with dogs.

These contradictions reach into the heart of Andersson’s narrative. For Somer was, in many respects, tragic. He was habitually abused. He was “lean, hollow-eyed and stooping,” a man who easily fell asleep and could be suddenly aggressive. Suffering from some kind of disability, he was a regular victim of the “bad fun” that also found voice in bearbaiting and public executions. He was valued and despised, laughed with (and at) and beaten, an emblem of innocence and evidence of sin. He was a man of humble attainments at the center of wealth, display, and power. But, in this world of deception, Somer told the truth. In a sphere of illusion, his authenticity made him a fool. But as a fool, he could share homespun wisdom and make accidental quips—and Henry paid attention. For Somer was a “human conversation piece,” as Andersson brilliantly puts it: a reminder to courtiers of the ordinary world outside the royal walls. In a sense, he stood as a metaphor for the nation at large, a stand-in for those who were governed. His role represented the people to the state. And so the court’s attitude to him was a kind of downward projection of power. For, as Andersson puts it, “the comedy did not derive from what the fool did as much as from what others did to the fool.”

Quite apart from its subject matter, Andersson’s new book is a significant contribution to discussions of historical technique. The study’s method is not just against the grain, it also makes much of absence. Of course, this approach is not without its complications. Andersson recognizes that the image of the fool was developing throughout this period, and that this developing image was being invested with particular tropes. This makes it difficult to evaluate the consistency of Somer’s depictions. It is helpful that the evidence of his appearance provided by a handful of contemporary portraits is confirmed in part by a small number of references in the court’s financial accounts. But the evidence provided by later representations of Somer might be much less useful in reconstructing Somer’s troubled life. At what point do we simply admit that he has escaped us? Or is his disappearance his latest and greatest trick?

Whatever these methodological qualifications, the book’s content is compelling: it offers the prehistory of comedy as the history of disability. Andersson packs a lot of thinking in a short but compelling read. Here’s one fool that we really must take seriously.