Academic Papers

Contrary to some journalists, political activists, and extreme left-wing historians, Israel has a long history dating back at least to the Hebrew settlement by Abraham in circa 2,090BC (4,113 years). Some scholars suggest the lineage can be traced back 5,784 years to Creation in Israel, though I prefer to rely on historical documents that can verify these dates. Hebrew history is well-documented in many Jewish sources dating back to antiquity, as well as the Mesopotamians, Greeks, Christianity, Gnosticism, the Druze, and Islam. There were various descendants of Noah that possessed the Promised Land at least verifiable to the timeline of Noah and the end of the flood, circa 2,457BC (4,480 years).

I have offered an opening teaser to my major academic work of A Comprehensive Commentary of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS in the hope you gain interest in the topic and to prove the origin of the Sonnets. Many years ago, when I first began my research into the Sonnets, I knew the Sonnets were a biblical commentary, but I could not follow the trail until I researched the Bassano family and their connection to the Zohar of Mantua. To use a Bassano expression, my desire is for professors, researchers, and students to “explore in the valley of secrets” and I am confident you will begin to love the sweetness of spirit that comes with such research. I have included research from Tomes 2 and 3 in this academic paper, even though they are not yet published. This was recently updated with a draft reference guide to the Sonnets.

Most, if not all, scholars around the world, do not understand the different races and their imageries within the Shakespearean works. A young African-American woman named Katrina who is involved with Hollywood said to me in 2015, “You need to dig deeper” and those words lodged deep in my spirit. I spent the next six years travelling the world and examining thousands of historical documents before I found the actual source documents used by the Jewish poet Emilia Bassano, and late last year I managed to finish Tome 1 of my series ‘A Comprehensive Commentary of SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS’ that I started over 15 years ago. One of the primary sources of the Shakespearean works is the Mantuan 1558-60 Aramaic and Hebrew Sefer ha-Zohar al ha-Torah (Book of Zohar, on the Torah) literally meaning, “Radiance on the Torah” (the Zohar), where the printing was supervised by Rabbi Isaac Bassano. This paper is dedicated to Katrina…

The dramatists of Shakespeare are often characterized as being feminists because of the frankness of Cordelia in King Lear, the shrewdness of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, and the psychological manipulation of Volumnia in Coriolanus. For over four hundred years we have performed the incredible representations of men and women and their various roles and responsibilities in society during the latter Renaissance period, where male actors would have pretended to be the character of Viola in Twelfth Night, while pretending to be her brother Sebastian, as a male character. This seems to be quite a complex idea in the latter sixteenth century. Some scholars have suggested that feminism did not exist during this era. I will prove in this paper that these assertions are fatally flawed – feminism was alive and well during that era. However, the dramatists of Shakespeare were not feminists, per say, they were in fact Master Kabbalists teaching the gender complexities of the ancient Zohar and the Tree of Life, where one can allow ego to ruin one’s life, or shut down our reactive system and be transformed to the supernal realm of perfection beyond human perception and repair the world.

Various researchers have written about the life, music, and some have detailed a few of the various instruments manufactured by the Bassano family of master craftsmen, but none have delved into what the real meaning behind their markings on the instruments really are. In this paper, I delve into the meaning bwhind these markings.

The reason for writing this paper was to prove or repudiate claims that Emilia Bassano and other Bassano descendants were “blackamoors”. The above portrait has been shared around the world as a depiction of Emilia Bassano after being published on Facebook by Ansell Ortell in 2015, with the assertion that Emilia was the sole author of the Shakespearean works. The inference is that Emilia Bassano was a Blackamoor, which by definition is a “member of the group of Muslim people from North Africa who ruled Spain from 711 to 1492”. This viral post, amongst other things, caused a young Hollywood scriptwriter to contact me regarding proving whether or not Emilia was a Blackamoor. Throughout this paper, I will prove that the Bassano family were not Blackamoors.

As most people know, the Bassanos were recognized as Master Kabbalists, physicians, teachers, authors (Heironymus, Antonio and Emilia in the very least), musicians, makers of diverse musical instruments, and even heretics because of their Jewish books of Kabbalah. They are probably least known as the Jewish “Songbirds” of Venice and England. A little known performance was on Sunday 6 August 1710 by Richard Bassano and his brother Christopher Bassano, the Vicar Choral at St Oswald’s Church in Derbyshire. As we investigate these records, we find the Bassano family sparked Revival.

Until now, there has been no definitive Genesis of the ‘Early Plays’ attributed to William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. These literary works have been significantly debated by eminent scholars, musicians, composers, and a number of historians over the past two decades, yet none have fully peeled back the layers of time to unearth the buried secrets subtly concealed beneath. Many of those who have undertaken studies have majored from a literary perspective, but none have dared to examine the historical records as a forensic historian through the eyes of a philosopher and theologian.

For centuries scholars have grappled with the fact that many of the Shakespearean characters are members of the Bassano family, but few have considered them as serious candidates for the dramatists of the Shakespearean works, until I released Shakespeare Exhumed: The Bassano Chronicles in 2013. In the lead up to the release of Genesis of the Shakespeare Works in early 2017, I thought it was time to release a paper containing some of my research into the Bassano family gathered over the last 14 years while forensically examining many thousands of relevant documents throughout the world.

After publishing ‘Shakespeare Exhumed: The Bassano Chronicles’ I was contacted by a descendant of Antonio Bassano. He told me he had a book that would be of interest to me. I did not understand the significance of Antonio Bassano’s 1544 Sefer ha-Refu’ot (Book of Remedies) until I began translating the Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts.

In August of 2012 a group of conservators named Sabina Pugh, Julie Sommerfeldt, Arthur Green, Vanessa Redgrave, Thelma Holt, Andrew Honey, and Nicole Gilroy examined and repaired the tattered First Folio in preparation for digitizing. The Senior Conservator of the Bodleian Library, Andrew Honey, closely examined the First Folio and compared it to other books bound by William Wildgoose held in the Bodleian Library, some of which were part of the same consignment as the First Folio, and others bound in the same period.

In the First Folio, there is a dedication to William Shakespeare by Ben Jonson. Within Jonson’s dedication, we find he attempted to defend Shakespeare against claims that a woman wrote the Shakespearean works. In examining the text, we must understand Ben Jonson was a good friend of Shakespeare, and happened to be with Shakespeare when he died of ‘feverous intoxication’ in April of 1616, some seven years before the First Folio was published. What we find next is intriguing...

In examining the 1597 First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet, we find it did not mention the name William Shakespeare – it was anonymous. This is not surprising, especially considering a number of the characters were developed from a legal case involving the Bassano family members from Verona (where the play is set) and Bassano Del Grappa.

The Eureka Stockade is often characterized as a handful of drunken, brawling foreign (predominantly Irish) rebels who refused to pay their taxes. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of the miners of Ballarat immigrated from across the world because of stories filled with promise and glorious gold nuggets. When they arrived, they found the goldfields of Ballarat were teaming with people in search of their dream, and a colonial government that charged a whopping thirty shillings licence fee each month, merely because of Governor Hotham’s haemorrhaging government purse. The paper licence had to be kept on their person and licence checks were carried out twice weekly with digger reports of being beaten with fists, boots, rifle butts, while threatened of being run through with bayonets if they did not cooperate. If a digger dare run, they were shot in the back by the Gold Commissioner’s police, who were fondly named “blue-pissants” because of their despicable cowardly and callous nature.