William Shakespeare's works: methods of philological interpretation

During three-odd centuries of its existence Shakespearology not only became a fully-fledged field of philological studies. It also acquired such a plethora of conflicting views that it makes many scholars concentrate exclusively on the linguistic side of Shakespeare’s texts and deny the significance of the biographical and historical information for understanding the great poet’s works. However, the philological interpretation of Shakespeare’s texts cannot be confined to their lexical-syntactic analysis, because in so many cases their content is the opposite of evident and it is not made clearer if one gets engaged in the elementary process of studying dictionaries of Shakespeare’s language. The methods which can be productive when one tries to study Shakespeare’s texts are those of historical-philological reconstruction and the biographical method of analysing works of verbal art (the directions of study in the latter case being either “from text to biography” or “from biography to text”). Though compromised by the irresponsible or the uninformed researchers and going against the popular relativist approach to the Humanities, the methods just mentioned may shed light on the following key-problems of modern Shakespearology: the reconstruction of the great writer’s early life, the authorship of Shakespeare’s texts, the political and religious conflicts of Shakespeare’s England and their relevance for interpreting the content of his texts.