Founder profile
John Adams
1735–1826
The most Shakespearean Founder by every measure of conscious citation. Sixty-one verbatim quotations, forty-seven by-name references, six Shakespeare-only character invocations under the strict standard — and twice the candidate-echo density of any other Founder.
108
Catalogue references(61 direct + 47 by-name)
297
Candidate echoes (MED+)(11,326 including LOW)
6
Shakespeare-only invocations(8 Roman-ambiguous, not scored)
58%
Archaic forms surviving
In summary
Adams sits at the top of the composite ranking under methodology v3 with a score of 0.87, ahead of Franklin at 0.78. He is the most Shakespearean of the six on every measure that counts conscious citation. The strict catalogue traces 108 HIGH or MEDIUM-confidence references to him (61 direct quotations and 47 by-name references); the candidate-echoes tier adds another 11,326 short verbatim matches under his name, with 297 in the MEDIUM-or-HIGH confidence band — more than twice the next Founder's count. The Shakespeare-only invocation tier (Falstaff, Shylock, Hotspur, Lady Macbeth) holds six of his hits, the only Founder with any. His 1758 diary contains the densest single reading event in the corpus: sixteen verbatim Macbeth passages worked through in one document at age twenty-three, with threads that flow forward for sixty years (the Tomorrow soliloquy, the Lady Macbeth speech, the sleep-no-more passage).
Metaphor signature
His metaphor fingerprint
Per-million rates across eight conceptual-metaphor families. Red is his profile; blue dashed silhouette is Shakespeare’s for comparison.
John Adams
Eleven measures
How he ranks across the project’s eleven measures
Lower number = more Shakespearean. Compare with other Founders →
Plays referenced
Which Shakespeare plays appear in his catalogue
- Macbeth20 refs
- The Tempest13 refs
- Othello, Moor Of Venice10 refs
- Julius Caesar8 refs
- Henry The Fifth5 refs
- The Second Part Of Henry The Sixth2 refs
- Comedy of Errors1 ref
- Alls Well That Ends Well1 ref
- The First Part Of Henry The Sixth1 ref
- Richard The Second1 ref
- Romeo And Juliet1 ref
- Hamlet, Prince Of Denmark1 ref
- Coriolanus1 ref
- Much Ado About Nothing1 ref
Case studies