Explorer
Quotation Timeline
All 137 dated Shakespeare references on one canvas. Click any dot.
Each dot is a single Shakespeare reference (either a direct quotation or a named mention) plotted at the year it was written. Each Founder gets their own row. Click any dot to see the passage in the panel below the chart.
The shape of the dot cloud is itself the project’s substantive story. Adams’s row is dense and runs from 1757 to 1825: sixty-eight years of continuous engagement with Shakespeare, with a striking cluster in his 1758 diary and another late cluster between 1810 and 1822. Jefferson’s row is mostly named references and book-list entries, thinly spread. The Hamilton row is empty: in his entire corpus, the project finds no high-or-medium-confidence Shakespeare references at all.
Founder
Reference type
Showing 137 of 137 dated references on the timeline. Click any dot to see the passage.
Click any dot on the timeline above to see the passage.
The densest cluster is on the Adams row in 1758 — his diary at twenty-two reading Macbeth and Othello in detail.
What this view shows
The Adams cluster, in pictures
The dense bunch of red dots on Adams’s row in 1758 is the project’s most striking single visual moment. Almost every dot in that cluster is from a single December 1758 diary entry: the twenty-two-year-old Adams in his father’s house in Braintree, transcribing long passages of Macbeth and Othello, gloss in the margin, returning to the same speeches multiple times. The pattern is biographically traceable: he was studying Shakespeare that month. Sixty-eight years of continuous Shakespearean engagement in the corpus all flow forward from that intensive young-lawyer reading.
The thin smattering on Franklin’s row is the opposite of the same story. Franklin almost never quotes Shakespeare and almost never names him. He doesn’t produce the kind of dots this view counts. His Shakespeare lives elsewhere, in the texture of his English, and shows up only when you measure the right things. The ‘Tis case study and the Two Modes essay describe what the timeline can’t.
The empty Hamilton row is the third major finding of the project at one glance. Two of the six Founders (Hamilton and Madison) effectively opt out of Shakespearean inheritance. The full case is in The Hamilton Silence essay.
To browse and filter the same data without the visual layout, use the Reference Catalogue. To compare the two corpora side by side on a specific word, try the Honour Test.