In 1638 the king’s jester asked an archbishop, “Who’s fool now?” and was thrown out of court the same day. The fool’s license to mock has changed hands ever since. It has rarely been the fool’s to keep.
Why we’re pointing you there
Archibald Armstrong had jested for two kings when he mocked Archbishop Laud over the Scottish prayer-book revolt. The Privy Council sentenced him to have his coat pulled over his head and be banished the court. Michael Cummins starts there and asks who has held the fool’s license since kings stopped keeping fools. He follows it through Shakespeare’s “allowed fool,” a caricaturist on a party pension, and a Victor Hugo play banned after a single night. Then a British cabinet minister takes a cartoonist to lunch, and in January 2025 a Pulitzer Prize winner walks out of the Washington Post.
What we liked most is the centerpiece. In 1937 Goebbels complained about David Low’s cartoons, and Lord Halifax carried the complaint home. The newspaper said it couldn’t control Low, so the minister had to ask the cartoonist himself. Low agreed to ease off, and answered with a new character whose name was a pun on what had just happened to him. The essay grants that the cost of losing the license has fallen a long way since Armstrong’s day. It ends by asking whether a paying public is a freer master than a king, or only a larger court.
Read the full essay at Intellicurean →
Essays & Reviews for the Intellectually Curious
Octavian Report “Rostrum” spoke with him about a major theme in Shakespeare’s work and life: disease. Specifically, pandemic plagues, which ravaged London repeatedly throughout Shakespeare’s career, shuttering the theaters, and which appear (obliquely and otherwise) in some of his greatest plays.
