Peter K. Andersson’s Fool is a curious and ingenious book, the intriguing outcome of a consciously doomed attempt to write the biography of a man upon whose mere and sparsely documented existence an inverted pyramid of anecdote and legend was precariously erected in the century that followed his death. The subject of this unusual exercise is William, or Will Somer, a marginal figure on the payroll of the royal court in the last dozen years of the reign of Henry VIII and through the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I. His role at court was as the king’s (or queen’s) fool, a role which was subsequently romanticised into that of the court jester, but which in the Tudor era, the author emphasises, represented not so much a comedian as a figure of fun.