A corpus-linguistic commentary
How much of Shakespeare’s English carried forward into the writing of the American Founders?
Unevenly. Adams quoted Shakespeare more than the other five combined. Franklin sounds more like him sentence for sentence without ever quoting. Hamilton and Madison wrote as if Locke and Hume had displaced the playwright entirely. The differences track when each Founder came of age more closely than they track who each Founder was.
An open experiment pairing corpus-linguistic methods with AI assistance across 23.7 million Founder words and Shakespeare’s 891,000. Every claim traces to downloadable data; the project is a starting point, not a finished argument.
Start here · three layers of evidence
The project tracks Shakespearean inheritance at three tiers of evidence, from strictest to loosest. The strict catalogue is the top: 137 verbatim quotations and by-name references that survived hand verification (61 direct quotations plus 76 by-name references, after the source-level audit). The middle tier is shorter candidate echoes (the word “candidate” is deliberate: these are short matches that pattern like Shakespeare references but haven’t been confirmed as ones). The bottom tier is thematic allusions: cases where a Founder invokes a Shakespearean character as a type without quoting the play. Click any card to browse that tier.
Verbatim 5+ word quotation, hand verified.
John Adams · 1758
“When the News of his Ladies death is brought to Mackbeth, he turns his Thoughts upon Life. Out out brief Candle! Lifes but a walking Shadow, a Poor Player That struts and frets his Hour upon the…”
Echoing Macbeth
4–5 word match with a distinctive Shakespeare word. A candidate for real inheritance; not yet confirmed as one.
Thomas Jefferson · 1790
“e. My newly purchased horse ( Brimmer ) performed well; I drove him a good deal in the carriage. I do not think he lost a pound of flesh on the road, so that I have a very good opinion of him. The…”
Echoing The Merchant Of Venice
Founder invokes a Shakespearean character as a type.
John Adams · 1776
“was become extreamly Obnoxious to Mr. Hancocks Party by his zealous Attachment to Mr. Samuel Adams and Mr. Richard Henry Lee. Such I supposed were the motives which excited Mr. Hancock, to bring…”
Echoing Henry IV / Merry Wives
The lower tiers carry weaker claims and come with caveats. Most short matches between any two large English corpora are coincidence. Read with judgment.
Who reached for Shakespeare?
Verified catalogue references, plus MEDIUM-or-HIGH-confidence candidate echoes, plus thematic character invocations. The stacked bar shows the three meaningful signals; the LOW-tier candidate echoes (mostly statistical noise) are reported in the row text but kept out of the stack.
The catalogue tier is the strict, verified evidence; the two right-hand tiers are candidates the strict filter missed. Click any Founder for their profile.
Which plays?
The strict catalogue and the relaxed candidate-echoes data tell two complementary stories. The catalogue is dominated by the tragedies Adams happened to copy out verbatim. The candidate echoes, with their wider net, surface the history plays the strict filter buried.
Strict catalogue
Top eight by verified verbatim quotations + by-name references
MEDIUM+ candidate echoes
Top eight of 645 four- and five-word matches across 37 plays; LOW-tier matches excluded.
All seventeen plays in the Play Atlas →All candidate-echo plays →
Go deeper
Per-finding deep dives
Adams quoting Macbeth in 1758. Washington paraphrasing Henry V at Valley Forge. The single line from Julius Caesar that Adams returned to across nearly four decades. Nine focused stories from the data.
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The long-form commentary
Nine chapters adapted from the research paper. The influence question, the methods, the two modes of Shakespearean inheritance, the Shakespeare-only characters, reading by generation, the Hamilton silence.
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All the interactive views
More than a dozen interactive views, including the catalogue and play atlas above. Compare any two Founders, see the metaphor fingerprint of each, browse the archaic-word survival ratio, watch the modal-verb shift.
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About this project
The structure mirrors the “interpretative pyramid” of America’s Public Bible (Lincoln Mullen, Stanford University Press). The data and the interactive views are up top. The case studies tell the stories behind individual passages. The essays make the broader argument. The papers page has the full scholarly write-up and downloadable JSON for the data.
All findings are reproducible. The research repository contains the corpus, the analysis scripts, and the statistical methodology. Every claim on this site traces to a CSV row and a Python script.
About this project — how the site was made · Image credits · Papers & data downloads