“You Know No Rules of Charity”: A Corpus Analysis of ‘Love’ in William Shakespeare’s Richard III Using Voyant Tools

Abstract

This essay conducts a corpus analysis of ‘love’ in Shakespeare’s Richard III using Voyant Tools, a free web-based application for analyzing digital texts. While Voyant Tools have been used in Shakespeare classes for educational purposes, it is hard to find any books or journal essays that incorporate the online program in Shakespeare drama research. It is hoped that the paper serves as an example that suggests academic potential of using digital tools in drama text analysis. Although Richard III is rarely discussed with reference to ‘love,’ the high frequency of the word in the text confirms its thematic importance in the play. My analysis of the corpus data makes the following discoveries. First, ‘love’ in Richard III has a broad spectrum of meaning ranging from erotic and familial love to loyalty and self-love. Second, the majority of references to ‘love’ come from or concern Richard and his chief assistant Buckingham, both of whom use the word for purposes of deception. Third, the type of love that is absent from all characters, including antagonist Richmond and those who display sincere love for their family or monarch, is ‘charity,’ the highest form of love modeled on God’s unconditional love for humanity. From these observations, it can be concluded that Shakespeare explores the broad spectrum of human love in order to satirize the absence of charity from the powerful figures that inhabit the world of Richard III as well as to expose the limitations and vulnerability of human love. If Richard III is a play of ‘love,’ as the corpus data suggests, it is not a critique of the title character but of the lack of charity in the world he was born into.