Founder profile
James Madison
1751–1836
Alone at the bottom of the composite at 0.11 after a source-level audit dropped his two MEDIUM-tier catalogue items as false positives — Talbot Mundy's adventure novel spliced into his Gutenberg supplement, and an 1780 'tempest' reference that described a real West Indies hurricane, not the play. Strict catalogue: zero.
0
Catalogue references(0 direct + 0 by-name)
28
Candidate echoes (MED+)(2,510 including LOW)
0
Shakespeare-only invocations
40%
Archaic forms surviving
In summary
Madison sits alone at the bottom of the composite at 0.11 after a source-level audit dropped the two false positives that had previously tied him with Hamilton. The 'I love thee, thou art' five-gram hit was traced to a Project Gutenberg ingest error: the supposed Madison Convention debates supplement was actually Talbot Mundy's 1916 adventure novel King of the Khyber Rifles spliced into his corpus; the catalogue scripts now skip every gut_* supplement to match the filter already in place in the candidate-echoes and thematic pipelines. The 1780 'tempest' reference was reclassified as LOW after the literary-cue regex stopped treating the word 'line' as evidence — in 18th-c American correspondence 'line' overwhelmingly means 'Ship of the line' or 'a line from him,' not 'a line of verse.' Cleaning the contaminated Gutenberg texts out of the statistical corpora (methodology v3) was the audit's sequel: it dropped his composite from 0.17 to 0.11 and erased five of his seven apparent Shakespeare-coinage phrase types — the silence got quieter the harder we looked. His strict catalogue is now genuinely empty. His candidate-echoes total of 2,510 — only 28 in the MEDIUM-or-HIGH band — is the lowest of the six per million words. He records zero Shakespeare-only character invocations under the strict standard. His distinctive metaphor signature is the PLANT family at 29.9 per million, roughly two and a half times any other Founder's rate, suggesting an intellectual lineage running through the classical republicans, the European confederation debates, and the Cato / Polybius pseudonym tradition rather than the English literary tradition.
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.
James Madison
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
None at the catalogue’s HIGH or MEDIUM confidence threshold. James Madison’s engagement with Shakespeare, if any, lives below the catalogue: in vocabulary, archaic-form survival, and metaphor profile rather than in named or quoted reference.