Sentence:  The time of his birth, his birth-place, his parentage, are all involved in obscurity ; and such has been the perplexing ingenuity of commentators, that it is difficult to extricate the truth from the <WSD>web</WSD> of conjectures with which it is interwoven. 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  Any interconnected set of persons, places, or things, which when diagrammed resembles a spider's web.