Founder profile
George Washington
1732–1799
Sparse explicit Shakespeare. He ranks fourth on the composite at 0.34. His one strict catalogue item is the Othello 'good name' passage, attributed to 'Shakespear' in an 1796 letter; the well-known 'band of brothers' phrasing sits in the reception/common-stock tier.
1
Catalogue references(0 direct + 1 by-name)
82
Candidate echoes (MED+)(7,015 including LOW)
0
Shakespeare-only invocations
41%
Archaic forms surviving
In summary
Washington's profile is the steady plain-prose Founder. He ranks fourth on the composite at 0.34. The strict catalogue holds exactly one HIGH-tier item for him: the 1796 letter to George Washington Parke Custis attributing the Othello 'he that robs me of my good name, enriches not himself, but renders me poor indeed' to 'Shakespear.' That is his one scored, by-name, in-text Shakespeare quotation. The widely-circulated Henry V 'band of brothers' phrase, traced through his General Orders at Valley Forge and his 1783 Farewell Address to the Army, sits in the candidate-echoes tier as reception evidence — by 1778 the phrase had passed into common military rhetoric, and it appears in his prose without literary framing. The Band of Brothers case study traces those uses but reframes them as reception/common-stock evidence rather than direct citation. His candidate-echoes total of 7,015 across a very large corpus, with 82 in the MEDIUM-or-HIGH band, is largely day-to-day phrasing from General Orders and military correspondence.
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.
George Washington
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. George Washington’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.