The subjects of this volume are the four nineteenth-century English writers who have been most enduringly hailed as Shakespearean. Shakespeare's plays extend in time and space beyond the ignorant present. They are made of up stories that ask for more telling, especially about their women characters, and this ambition may be realized in a medium less sharply bounded than the theatre. Sir Walter Scott was the first novelist to be acclaimed as a modern Shakespeare; Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are the successors who have most frequently prompted comparison of the novel's capabilities with Shakespearean drama.