Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to Ben Jonson (1572-1637), English Renaissance satirical dramatist, poet, actor and contemporary of Shakespeare, or to his works.

Etymologies

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Jonson +‎ -ian

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Examples

  • There would be plenty of scope for individual variation to reflect the particular styles of individual authors Sophocles could be rendered Shakespearian, Aristophanes as Jonsonian comedy, Plato translated into the style of Francis Bacon and so on; and writers from other periods could be slotted into other periods: Apollonius Rhodius translated with Shelleyan flourishes, for instance.

    Translation Adam Roberts Project 2007

  • There would be plenty of scope for individual variation to reflect the particular styles of individual authors Sophocles could be rendered Shakespearian, Aristophanes as Jonsonian comedy, Plato translated into the style of Francis Bacon and so on; and writers from other periods could be slotted into other periods: Apollonius Rhodius translated with Shelleyan flourishes, for instance.

    Archive 2007-12-01 Adam Roberts Project 2007

  • One of the most learned of the group was George Chapman, whose verse has a Jonsonian solidity not unaccompanied with Jonsonian ponderousness.

    A History of English Literature Robert Huntington Fletcher

  • In some comedies of Shakspere, which appeared between the years 1598 and 1601, there are characters markedly stamped with Jonsonian peculiarities.

    Shakspere and Montaigne Jacob Feis

  • Jonsonian view of Shakespeare, whose "easy numbers" he contrasted with

    Some Account of the Life of Mr. William Shakespear (1709) Nicholas Rowe

  • Jonsonian to the writer, 'to get old Paley, on a cold winter's night, to put up his legs, wrap them well up, stir the fire, and fill him a long Dutch pipe; he would talk away, sir, like a being of a higher sphere.

    Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce E. R. Billings

  • It is more serviceable, more businesslike, more eloquently practical, and more rhetorically effusive—but never effusive beyond the bounds of effective rhetoric—than the style of any Shakespearean or of any Jonsonian dramatist. 2

    Imperfect Critics Thomas Stearns 1920

  • I know excellent critics who, declining altogether to consider the book as a novel, regard it as a sort of satire and _satura_, Aristophanic, Jonsonian or other, in gist and form, and by no means a failure as such.

    A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 To the Close of the 19th Century George Saintsbury 1889

  • About Walter Shandy there is more room for difference: and it is possible to contend that, great as he is, he is not complete -- that he is something of a "humour" in the old one-sided and over-emphasised Jonsonian sense.

    The English Novel George Saintsbury 1889

  • _The Jealous Lovers_, a play with classical nomenclature, and at first seeming to aim at the Terentian model, drifts off into something like the Jonsonian humour-comedy, of which it gives some good studies, but hardly a complete example.

    A History of Elizabethan Literature George Saintsbury 1889

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