Essays
The Commentary
Nine chapters covering the influence question, the methods, and the substantive findings.
The essays are the long-form companion to the research paper. Each chapter is adapted from a section of reports/paper.md in the research repository, restructured for the web with inline charts and KWIC quotations from the data.
- Chapter 1· live
Preface
Why this site exists, what it's for, and how to read it. The most welcoming chapter; the one most readers will enter through.
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- Chapter 2· live
The Influence Question
What it means to ask carefully how much of Shakespeare's English carried forward into the Founders' writing. The three findings in summary; a reading guide to the rest.
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- Chapter 3· live
How We Asked the Question
What the project actually did, in plain English. Why we picked the corpus we did, what counts as 'Shakespearean influence', and how we kept ourselves honest.
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- Chapter 4· live
Two Modes of Shakespearean Influence
Adams citational, Franklin absorbed. The substantive finding. Why a single distance metric loses the shape of what each Founder did.
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- Chapter 5· live
The Shakespeare-Only Characters
Six character-as-type invocations in the corpus that can only have come from Shakespeare's plays: Falstaff, Shylock, Hotspur, Lady Macbeth. All Adams, across forty-two years. A smaller finding than the data first seemed to support, recorded honestly.
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- Chapter 6· live
Reading by Generation
Adams was born in 1735, Hamilton in 1757. The data shows their Shakespeare is a generation apart. The catalogue tracks when each Founder came of age more closely than it tracks who they were.
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- Chapter 7· live
Eleven Ways of Looking
Why we believe the findings. Eleven independent ways of measuring Shakespearean inheritance mostly agree on the per-Founder ranking, and the place they disagree is the disagreement that produces the two-modes story.
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- Chapter 8· live
The Hamilton Silence
Hamilton has zero verbatim Shakespeare quotations, zero by-name references, zero detectable Shakespearean stylistic features. Madison's record is the same. What the absence means for the project's wider argument.
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- Chapter 9· live
References and Reproducibility
The full reading list, the data sources, and the path from the database to every claim on this site.
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