A Shakespearean proficiency in meter and rhetoric may to F L Light be ascribed. Nearly forty of his dramas are now available on Amazon, and twenty have been produced for Audible. His Gouldium is a series of twenty four dramas on the life and times of Jay Gould which he followed with six plays on Henry Clay Frick. The whole first book of his translation of The Iliad was published serially in Sonnetto Poesia. He has also appeared in Classical Outlook and The Raintown Review. Most of his thirty five books of couplets are on economics, such as Shakespeare Versus Keynes and Upwards to Emptiness the State Expands.

Excerpt from the last scene of the Mortal Lopez, part two.

Hampton Court. The Queen, Essex and Francis Bacon.

Essex: On matrimonial fortune he’s composed
An essay, which your Majesty may wish
To hear.

The Queen:     How married happenings could mar
My house in horror I have known. O what
A procreant consequence my sire pursued!
Now your unmarried rumination I
Will hear, comparing what I’ve learned so long.

Bacon: In costly hostage, captive usage, are
One’s wife and children all by fortune held,
Being clogs to our contentions for success.
The vigor of attainment is avowed
Without them, and the manliest hunt for fame
Is found in childless hunters for the chance
Of quests. The brightest consummations, sought
With brains, and labored greatnesses, fulfilled
Protractedly with grief, have been pursued
By the unmarried. But no dim incitement,
Concerning readiness for all the cares
Of growth, constrains a house of parents, who
Of future requisites would not be short.
Yet there are some, though for expedience
All unespoused, who hold all future causes as
But futile thoughts. And in unwedded thrift
Some hold that wife and children are at length
Too chargeable. And some immodest opulence
In household ostentation manifest,
Who’d seem most rich without the charge of children.
But motive freedom is the cause for most
Unmarried, who’d for expeditiousness
Be free, remaining self-productively
Resolved, apt to accomplish thoughts of wealth
Or wit. Such fellows think their ruffs and girdles
No less than yokes and subjugative ropes.
No better friends than those unmarried will
You find. As masters, servants or advisers
I see them best, but not as subjects, being
From burdens of the crown inclined to shift
In paced escapes, incumbencies eschewing.
But single days befit a churchman, who,
To no parental charity obliged,
May play the father to his faithful pews.
Yet soldiers matrimonial loyalty
Should have, whose generals, addressing them,
Exhorting furtherance in courage, will
Adduce their wives and children as the troops
Come forth. And Turkish soldiers to extremes
Of baseness run who marriage cruelly scorn.
But to compel humanity what else
But families should be first? And single men,
Though with the means for charity unused,
Are oft unsparing in their spurns of love
Because no wife or child has ever moved
Their mercy. I’ve known women, chastely single,
Who prideful, wrathful, and pretentious were,
As if their chastity permitted them
To chastise all. And wives are likelier apt
For loyalty who know their spouses trust them.
But jealous men incite disloyal wrath.
Wives are concubines in youth, companions
For intact maturity and nurses when
Debilitated weariness declines.
No dubious protest thus a man might bring
To marry at whatever age. But one
Of philosophic name believed there was
No timeliness in marriage for the young
Or old. And all observers have averred
That kindly wives have often churlish men
Of faultiest cruelty, waiting on their spite
Either to savor patience or to raise
In long probation the true worth of kindness.
But of all husbands none was kinder than
Odysseus who preferred his homely crone
To the insatiate immortality
Provided on the island of Calypso.

The Queen: Pangs of unwedded disappointment it
Bestirs in us who’d never grief admit.