“A certain young man,” the playwright began, “well born, well favored, well endowed, with every grace of mind and heart, fair of form as a young god, a very Antinous among his kind, a beautiful youth who has thought ill of none, much less having performed it against any, has yet been born to one signal disadvantage. And the disadvantage is so uncommon in itself that it seems strange that he should suffer it. It is merely that he is too much the favorite of fortune. And yet I would have your grace remark, for that is the essence of my story, how this one faint cloud in the fair heaven of this youth’s tranquility is enough to contrive his overthrow, to dim all his glories, to rob him of all hope of peace and happiness in this life.” The Queen nodded her head sympathetically. She was following every word with the closest attention. And indeed the pregnant manner of the story’s telling compelled it. “The young man’s disadvantage is very great inasmuch that he has the ill-hap to inspire the covetous envy of a wicked kinsman. It is a simple stroke of ill-fortune, as your grace will see, which he cannot help and for which he is not in any wise responsible. This kinsman, his father’s brother, although himself a man of property and well placed in the world, is yet consumed with a desire to add to his own demesne his nephew’s broad lands in the west country. He is a bitter-hearted and envious man, who has carried on a perpetual war with fortune because she has not made him the elder brother. “Chance puts a weapon in the hands of this covetous man. The age is one of peril and unrest. It is a time in which every man suspects his neighbor. Nothing is easier for a base man who is also bold than to bring a charge of misfeasance against one he would remove and whose lands he would inherit. And this is what the uncle decides to do in the matter of his nephew. He procures two evil men to accuse the young man of having borne a part in a wicked and vile conspiracy against the person of the sovereign. In the age in which the play is cast such things are unhappily too common, and this is a bad man’s opportunity. “To be brief, your grace, the plot is laid, the charge is made, the young man is brought to trial and condemned upon the evidence of two suborners. He is unable to refute the accusation, so cunning are the rogues by whom he is beset; moreover the author of the plot has always passed for a just and disinterested man.