‘Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man’
By Peter K. Andersson
Princeton University Press, 224 pages

Even by the end of this biography, you will wonder how much you know about Will Somer, and that is all to the good. Peter K. Andersson is one of those biographers who takes nothing for granted, nothing on trust, and never allows himself a moment of wishful thinking about what he thinks he knows about his subject.

The provable, documentary facts about Will Somer could probably be put on a page next to that page or so of Shakespeare’s biography that so many biographers, nonetheless, have tried to make book on. 

Yet there Somer is, in several portraits, part of the king’s court, fulfilling the function, at the very least, of what Mr. Andersson calls a mascot. No court was without its fool, but much that has been written about Somer is, as Mr. Andersson discovers, posthumous supposition and legend-making.

As the biographer demonstrates, it is not even known what kind of fool Somer was: natural or artificial. Was he feigning foolery or was he actually what today is called “mentally challenged”? I suspect, recalling the cruelty of my own childhood, that humor might have been derived by thinking of Somer as the latter. My young contemporaries in the 1950s would have had another word or two to describe him. 

Was Somer’s wit unwitting — the kind that children express — or a cunning performance? If Mr. Andersson cannot answer these questions, he nonetheless provides a therapeutic rebuke to much of the nonsense written about Somer, though the biographer is much too scholarly and polite to plainly say a lot of his putative sources are bunk.

What Mr. Andersson emphasizes is Somer’s indispensability as a king’s companion, and perhaps as a figure close to the commoners that were not otherwise a part of court culture, but who had to be understood in order to rule. Somer was probably not a comedian or even funny in the modern sense, but he could speak out of turn as only a fool could to a king, who wanted him in the picture.

Out of the lore about Somer, the biographer gleans a few details, like the fool’s easily falling asleep and his short temper that may have aroused both anger and amusement, but much that is attributed to Somer is generic and part of what was said about other fools. Mr. Anderssson probes what it was like to live and entertain at a Tudor court — such as what clothing certain records specify for Somer during his long tenure in the royal household.

Modern biographers, and readers of modern biography, may find Mr. Andersson’s method of cross-examining his sources helpful in assessing, say, biographies of Hollywood and other famous figures that are replete with precisely the kind of bogus testimony that Mr. Andersson demolishes. He is especially instructive when dealing with stories in circulation attributed to Somer that the biographer can trace to stories about other fools and to the agendas of those telling stories about Somer.

Social media is stuffed with quotations from William Faulkner, Winston Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, and other notables who never spoke or wrote the words attributed to them, but like those sources of yore that Mr. Andersson dissects, the social media mavens blithely disseminate what pleases them rather than what they can document.

What is striking about Somer, as evinced by his portraits, is his staying power, and Mr. Andersson suggests that Somer represented a continuity of Tudor power between the 1530s and the reign of Elizabeth I. 

As mascot, as pet, the fool may seem to be demeaned, and may well have been treated roughly, Mr. Andersson supposes, and yet the fool remained integral to a culture’s sense of itself. And so it is that we learn in search of this fool something about the nature of power, which requires subordinate figures and weaker props on which to build a sense of spectacle.

The biography of a fool, especially the specific fool of Will Somer, whether he was performing or just being himself, becomes, in the end, a story about the performance art of the court, and of power itself. 

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “A Higher Form of Cannibalism? Adventures in the Art and Politics of Biography” and of the forthcoming “Ronald Colman: Hollywood’s Gentleman Hero.”