Explorer
The Interactive Layer
See the patterns yourself.
These are tools for digging into the data behind the essays. Each one lets you ask the same question in a different way. The essays explain what the project found; the case studies tell the stories behind individual findings; the explorer is where you can poke at the corpus yourself.
Full-corpus search
Search the full text of 82,107 documents: every word in the six Founders' writings and Shakespeare's complete works. Filter by author, year, and document type. The deepest layer of the project.
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Candidate Echoes
All 35,794 short verbatim matches between the Founders and Shakespeare, served live with three candidate tiers (Strong / Medium / Low). 'Full of sound and fury' from Adams 1758, 'a pound of flesh' from Jefferson 1790, many more. Low-tier matches are mostly coincidence; the Medium-and-above tier is where the real signal lives.
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Thematic Allusions
Cases where a Founder invokes a Shakespearean character as a type rather than quoting Shakespeare or naming him. 'Harrison was another Sir John Falstaff' (Adams 1776). Nineteen distinct passages after within-document dedup; six are Shakespeare-only scored (all Adams), the remainder are Roman-ambiguous (Brutus, Caesar) and shown as non-scored.
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Reference Catalogue
Search and filter every traceable Shakespeare reference across the six Founders: 137 verified HIGH/MEDIUM instances after the source-level audit (61 verbatim quotations + 76 by-name references, distributed Adams 108, Jefferson 26, Franklin 2, Washington 1, Madison 0, Hamilton 0). Filter by who, when, and what kind of reference.
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Quotation Timeline
Every dated Shakespeare reference in the Founders' writings plotted on a single timeline, from the 1750s through 1822. See when each Founder reached for Shakespeare, and notice the empty rows.
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The Play Atlas
Which Shakespeare plays the Founders reach for, under two evidence thresholds. The strict catalogue is dominated by Macbeth, The Tempest, Othello and the four other plays Adams happened to copy out. The candidate-echoes view recovers the histories: 1 Henry IV jumps to the top.
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The Ranking
Eleven ways of measuring Shakespearean influence, side by side. Click any method to re-sort the matrix; click any Founder to see their profile. The single place the methods disagree is the whole argument.
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Word in Context
Type any word and see every place it appears, in both corpora, with the surrounding sentence — the concordance view scholars call KWIC. The fastest way to check any claim on this site against the raw text.
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Metaphor Fingerprints
Six radar charts, one per Founder. Eight metaphor families per radar (edifice, body, ship, fire, plant, path, motion, container), with Shakespeare's silhouette overlaid for comparison. Each Founder has a distinctive shape, and Shakespeare's EDIFICE is zero.
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The Archaic Threshold
Thirty-seven archaic Shakespearean forms (thou, hath, methinks, prithee, betwixt) tested against each Founder's corpus. Pick a Founder. See which words crossed from 1600 to 1800 and which didn't.
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Sentence Length
Histograms of sentence length across each Founder and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's median sentence is five words; the Founders' run 17 to 26. The most dramatic single divergence the project finds between the corpora.
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Function-Word Fingerprint
Per-million rates of 36 high-frequency function words across each author, with cosine similarity to Shakespeare. The classic Mosteller-Wallace stylometric signal: the small grammatical scaffolding that distinguishes any writer from any other.
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The Modal-Verb Shift
Watch shall give way to will and ought give way to should over the Founders' sixty-year writing window. The English modal system in transit from 1600 to 1820, with Shakespeare's rates as the fixed reference.
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The Honour Test
Pick a common word (honour, power, love, friend) and see what neighbours it keeps in each corpus. The same English word lives in two completely different worlds in Shakespeare and in the Founders.
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