Articles

Abstract

All authors writing on Shakespeare’s plays — being philosophers of language or not, being theoreticians or not — can’t escape from one detail: almost everywhere his language provokes some quantity of possible interpretations competing with one another in spectators’ minds. These authors — especially if they are theoreticians and surely if they are philosophers of language — can have different and sometimes opposite points of view on the nature of Shakespeare’s language and, consequently, its meanings. Some of these points of view are very exotic — for instance, what could be changed in understanding of Shakespeare’s language if this language had been invented by Francis Bacon? We think that ideas of this sort must be explained with the only reason: Shakespeare’s language is really of philosophical virtues. But we are sure that these virtues are his own achievement, they were elaborated by him as the implicit discourse of his specific and highly personalized manner to work with language and texts. Thinking on philosophical universality of many passages of Shakespeare’s texts we’ve developed the following version of this phenomenon: 1) this universality is real, not metaphorical; 2) this universality comes from intertextuality of Shakespeare’s plays; 3) this universality is especially evident in Shakespeare’s playwrights because he realized the theoretical meaning of his creative operations with text as special kind of re-writing old stories in which the everlasting elements were supposed to be kept and stressed to carry out the fundamental meaning of the text to which such a procedure has been applied; 4) there are reasons to think that because Shakespeare many times repeated this procedure he elaborated an implicit discourse on their textual essence; 5) because this discourse was based on the essence of what is now called intertextuality we could evaluate Shakespeare as an implicit theoretician of this subject-matter; 6) this evaluation gives us some adding instruments in understanding Shakespeare’s intellectual heritage and provides us an opportunity to re-look at its possible theoretical connotations that we propose to see in philosophy of mind.