ABSTRACT
The Galloway horse is an extinct breed that at the turn of the seventeenth century played a remarkably political role in English popular culture. As this chapter will show, the landrace was on one hand thought desirable and profitable to breed, while on the other hand it was negatively associated with its Scottish origins. This contradictory reputation was used by William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson to reflect upon English-Scottish relations, and in the case of Jonson, to explicitly comment upon the character of England’s new king, James I. What these playwrights’ use of the Galloway name indicates is that at the end of Elizabeth I’s reign horses were used as shorthand to represent regional, national, and in the case of James, personal identities.
