When asked to describe William Shakespeare, most people recall the sculpture that depicts the playwright as a middle-aged, balding, rotund pedestrian holding a quill pen. This represents an idealized image intended to depict the author when he resided in London’s narrow lanes. When sufficient evidence was uncovered indicating that the author had undertaken equestrian journeys, Long Rider artist Katie Cooper was commissioned to create a new world view of Shakespeare in the Saddle. It shows a young man in love and riding a stallion to retrieve the money needed to marry his fiancée, Anne Hathaway. What inspired this change?

In 2017 the Long Riders’ Guild Academic Foundation received an unusual research request. Two scholars investigating William Shakespeare’s marriage had detected evidence indicating that the most celebrated English playwright in history might have been a Long Rider. While attempting to confirm or deny that possibility, the LRGAF began a search for clues that would reveal how horses had influenced the best-selling author of all time. What emerged was a treasure trove of equestrian evidence.

During the years in which the Shakespeare Equestrian Collection was being assembled, world-wise equestrians, highly literate scholars and knowledgeable citizens of many countries unanimously expressed wonderment when told that William Shakespeare and horses were inescapably intertwined. Shakespeare and Horses: Facts and Findings is a special summary article designed to provide the average reader with an easy to understand but vitally important list of facts about how horses exerted such a strong influence on Shakespeare's personal and professional life. It contrasts the remarkable differences between the equestrian worlds of Queen Elizabeth 1 and Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II.

This collection of articles provides evidence of how horses played a significant role in William Shakespeare’s personal life, including his marriage, his knowledge of horses, and his subsequent employment as a horse handler in London. This collection of articles provides evidence of how horses played a significant role in William Shakespeare’s personal life, including his marriage, his knowledge of horses, and his subsequent employment as a horse handler in London. Shakespeare Leaving Home--The Farewell depicts the family standing on Clopton Bridge which spans the river Avon. The illustrated biography contains this first image of Shakespeare in the saddle.

An Illustrated Biography of William Shakespeare by Charles Cattermole

Glossary of Tudor Equestrian Terms by Walter Skeat

Horse Fairs in Stratford-Upon-Avon by Victoria County History

Shakespeare on Horseback by Charles Edward Flower

Shakespeare and Horsemanship as an Art by Anthony Dent

Shakespeare and Literary Long Riders by CuChullaine O’Reilly

Shakespeariana and Horses by Unknown

Shakespeare – From the Stable to the Stage by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps

Shakespeare in the Saddle by Mark Moran and Anjali Saini

Horses or equestrian references appear in all of Shakespeare’s plays! This collection of articles focuses on equestrian influences in the different plays.

Altering a Race of Jades - Horse Breeding and Geohumoralism in Shakespeare by Ian MacInne

Arcite's Horsemanship by MacDonald Jackson

Caparisoned like the Horse - Tongue and Tail in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew by LaRue Love Sloan

Enobarbus on Horses - in Anthony and Cleopatra by Gordon N. Ross

Flying Horse in Henry V by Haldeen Braddy

Gertrude's Elusive Libido by Richard Levin

Hollow Men and False Horses by Sydney J. Krause

Horse for Richard III by Stephen Derry

Horse-Handling in Shakespeare's Poems and Renaissance Codes of Conduct by Jonathan W. Thurston

Horsemanship in Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy by Robert Watson

Horses and Hermaphrodites: Metamorphoses in The Taming of the Shrew by Jeanne Addison Roberts

Horses and Women in the Taming of the Shrew by Joan Hartwig

Horses of Hamlet by Mordecai Gorelik

Horses of Macbeth by Bert States

How Many Horses has Sonnet 51 by MacDonald Jackson

Lady and her Horse Keeper by Cedric Watts

Lear's Soiled Horse by David Blythe

Missing a Horse: Richard and White Surrey by Erica Sheen

More Ladies and their Horse Keepers by Richard Levin

My Kingdom for a Horse by Paulo Cericei

My Kingdom for a Horse by Ceri Sullivan

Shakespeare's Horses - An Illustrated History of Equine Actors by CuChullaine O'Reilly

Shakespeare and the Post-Horses - A New Study of the Merry Wives of Windsor by J. Crofts

Shakespeare's Quotes about Horses

Stepping Out of Narrative Line: A Bit of Horse Play in Venus and Adonis by Margaret Tudeau-Clayton

The Hobby Horse's Epitaph by Robert L. Chibka

Think when we talk of Horses by Gregory Dornan

Time and Horsemanship in Shakespeare's Histories by Hugh MacLean

Venus, Adonis and the Horses by Robert Miller

The Shakespeare Equestrian Collection was created to encourage further research into this special aspect of the author’s personal and professional life. These websites represent the valuable equestrian research done to date and the LRGAF would like to commend their creators/authors for their ground-breaking studies.

Bard Film

History on Horseback

Murray and Blue – Equestrian Research

Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

Shakespeare: Horses and Horsemanship

Shakespeare’s horses: nags, jades and steeds, or wonders of nature

Shakespeare Online

The Tudor Dynasty

The Tudor Horse

Victorian Illustrated Shakespeare Archive

“At every crossway in the road that leads to the future, tradition has placed, against each of us, ten thousand men to guard the past,” wrote Maurice Maeterlinck, Belgian horse lover and Nobel Laureate author.

The Long Riders’ Guild Academic Foundation was created in 2009 thanks to the inspiration provided by Prince Philip. His Royal Highness, the Duke of Edinburgh, had long championed an alliance between lucid scientists and enthusiastic amateurs. He said, “Many of our pioneering engineers started without any formal training but had a passion, and a talent, for invention and development. The system does not seem to be able to cope with the ‘hands-on’ enthusiast, who has no immediate interest in academic qualifications.”

Scientists and the equestrian public need not be strangers. The challenge, according to the Duke, is to entice the public to become enthused and involved. The need to engage the public in equestrian research was articulated as far back as 1987 when Harold Barclay observed, “The horse journals and popular horse books are too full of gross historical and ethnographic error, and the historians and anthropologists who deal with the horse sometimes hardly know the difference between a crupper and a collar.”

The Shakespeare Equestrian Collection has thrown open the barn door and reveals that Shakespeare’s involvement with horses, be it as a Long Rider or as an author, is neglected by scholars, misunderstood by audiences, and warrants further examination.

Yet Shakespeare and horses is not a topic restricted to a rarefied few. This is an exciting new type of equestrian exploration, one that invites participation by all of those who love horses and the Bard’s plays. For this reason, the creation of the SEC is intended to be a long term global project, one that welcomes contributions from established academics but also values the discoveries made by independent “citizen scientists.”

The Long Riders’ Guild Academic Foundation would like to thank the dedicated academics, impassioned amateur scholars, inquisitive librarians and equestrian artists whose contributions inspired the creation of this singular anthology.

If you would like to contribute to the Shakespeare Equestrian Collection, please contact CuChullaine O’Reilly at – longriders@thelongridersguild.com

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