Explorer
The Ranking
How Shakespearean is each Founder’s writing? Eleven ways of measuring, side by side.
The project measures Shakespearean influence eleven independent ways. Seven of the measures are statistical or stylistic (vocabulary breadth, archaic forms, metaphor families, function words). Three are evidence-based (verified Shakespeare references, thematic character invocations, candidate-echo density per million words). The eleventh is the overall composite, which is the average rank position across the other ten. The eleven measures mostly agree on the per-Founder ranking, and the place they disagree most sharply (Adams dominates the citational measures; Franklin dominates the statistical ones) is the substantive finding of the project.
Click any method name to re-sort the table. Click any Founder’s column header to see their rank profile expanded below. Toggle Highlight method disagreement to circle the cells where a Founder’s rank diverges sharply from their median. The disagreement is where the two modes of Shakespearean inheritance show themselves.
How is the composite score calculated?
Each Founder’s composite is the inverse of their average rank position across ten base methods. The methods are: pronoun-distribution similarity, archaic-form survival, metaphor pattern similarity, statistical-style overlap, use of Shakespeare-coined phrases, Shakespearean vocabulary, Shakespearean context patterns, verified Shakespeare references per million words, thematic character invocations per million words, and candidate-echo density per million words. Each method ranks the six Founders 1 to 6; the composite averages those positions and rescales to a 0–1 range where higher means more Shakespearean.
Three properties to keep in mind. The composite is relative: it ranks Founders against each other, not against an absolute Shakespeare benchmark. The ten base measures are equally weighted. And the composite captures both citation and absorbed style by design, because Shakespeare inheritance in this period takes both forms (see the Two Modes essay).
The original seven statistical and stylistic measures come from the research pipeline in scripts/cs4..cs8 and influence1..3. The three evidence-based measures are computed directly from the project’s passage-level catalogue, thematic-allusion data, and candidate-echo backend, normalized by each Founder’s corpus size in millions of words.
Evidence summary
Per-Founder evidence across every layer
The raw counts behind the composite. Catalogue is HIGH/MEDIUM verified Shakespeare references (direct quotations + by-name) after the source-level audit; thematic is character-as-type invocations restricted to the strict Shakespeare-only set (Falstaff, Shylock, Hotspur, Lady Macbeth, etc.) — Roman names like Brutus and Caesar appear in the data but are shown as ambiguous (non-scored) on the Thematic Allusions explorer because Plutarch reaches them too. MED+ echoes are the medium-or-high-confidence candidate echoes (the meaningful signal in the 35,794-row relaxed tier). The combined-per-million column adds all three layers and divides by each Founder’s corpus size in millions of words. Adams sits at roughly twice Franklin and more than ten times Madison.
| Founder | Words | Catalogue | Thematic (Shakespeare-only) | MED+ echoes | Combined / M |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adams | 4.2M | 108 | 6 | 297 | 97.9 |
| Franklin | 1.6M | 2 | 0 | 81 | 51.9 |
| Jefferson | 6.7M | 26 | 0 | 130 | 23.4 |
| Washington | 5.8M | 1 | 0 | 82 | 14.3 |
| Hamilton | 2.2M | 0 | 0 | 27 | 12.2 |
| Madison | 3.2M | 0 | 0 | 28 | 8.6 |
The combined-per-million column is the headline measure of total Shakespeare evidence per Founder, normalized for corpus size. The composite score below adds statistical and stylistic measures alongside.
Sort by
| Way of measuring | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 3 | 1 | 2 | 5 | 4 | 6 | |
| 2 | 1 | 3 | 5 | 4 | 6 | |
| 2.5 | 1 | 2.5 | 5 | 6 | 4 | |
| 1 | 5 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 6 | |
| 2 | 1 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 6 | 5 | |
| 1 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 5.5 | 5.5 | |
| 1 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | 4 | |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
Overall ranking: The project's headline number: inverse of average rank position across the ten base methods.
Click any Founder’s name in the matrix to see their rank profile across all eleven methods.
Or toggle “highlight method disagreement” above — the methods agree on most things, but the disagreements are the substantive story of the project.
What the disagreement says
Adams owns the citational measures. Franklin owns the statistical ones.
Toggle the disagreement view and read across Adams’s row. He is rank 1 on six of the eleven methods: the use of Shakespeare-coined phrases, Shakespearean context patterns, and all three new citational measures (verified references, thematic invocations, candidate-echo density per million words), plus the overall composite. On the remaining statistical measures he sits at rank 2 or 3.
Franklin’s row is the mirror. He is rank 1 on five methods: pronoun distribution, archaic forms, metaphor profile, statistical style, and Shakespearean vocabulary. The man whose English is statistically the closest to Shakespeare’s of any of the six is also the one who almost never reaches for a Shakespeare quotation on purpose. On the coined-phrases row he sits at rank 5, next to last.
The disagreement between rows is the entire two-modes argument compressed into the matrix. Adams collected Shakespeare. Franklin absorbed Shakespeare. The Two Modes essay tells the same story in prose; the matrix is the proof.
See the methodological argument for these eleven measures in the Eleven Ways of Looking essay, or the case studies for each Founder’s individual story in the case studies.