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 trial of Lopez in the Guildhall, London. Behind Lopez and Sir Edward Coke sits a commission of fifteen jurors, including Sir Robert Cecil.

Lopez:      A tortured oneness you demand
In all your towns. This nation’s consonance
Upon tormented uniformity
Depends. Invariable ignorance,
As constant as oblivion, is coerced
Forever, as incarcerated shocks
For all dissenters you account deserved.
Whoever is untortured will be tamed
Erelong. Minacious penalties, immense
In deprivation, mean no differers
Are free. What sanctimonious calumnies
You cast at them, for blank monotony
Suppressing faces.

Coke:                    Lopez, what pertains
To this? Vociferating mutiny
Condemns you, so against the crown you seem.

Lopez: I in the Tower was a tamed attester.
The threatful rack my truthfulness repressed.
I saw my menacers decisive. What
Lord Burghley wished he meant to wrench, as did
Sir Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex
And William Wade. To them I lied of guilt.
Not striving with their threat, no torture I’d
Endure, too haplessly exposed to speak
My mind.

Cecil:      Thou Hebrew, vilest impotence
Befall you! Liar, be hapless on the block!

Lopez: Cecil, you deceitful statuette,
What can you state but a resentful threat?

Cecil: Asseveration soulful I believe
That says thou liest, in this assemblage blurting.

Lopez: Your crooking of my cause befits a crossed
Deformity whose manliness is lost.

Cecil: Corrupted pest! As deathful as your care
A traitor is with all the tricks you bear!

Lopez: You queenish midget, whom gigantic mocks
Should judge, be found a proditory fox!

Coke: Leave insultation, losel! Who are you
To counter Robert Cecil with contempt?
Now you commissioners, your votes in sums
Of guilt or innocence discover here.
Either of treason to her Majesty
Or for acquittal in this case hold forth.