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The term classicism is used here in two senses - as a literary and philosophical system that asserts and celebrates the existence of a series of timeless, unvarying principles of conduct and thought: attention to form, decorum, knowledge, the past, imitation, consistency, fidelity, personal worth; and as an acknowledgment that those principles are embodied in the writings of ancient Greece and Rome, which should be taken as models by all later writers aspiring to repeat the process. It is clear that Jonson embraced classicism in the second sense. He consciously imitated ancient Greek and Roman authors (although mainly Roman), and called attention to his debt in learned notes to his plays and masques. But he was also a classicist in the first sense, for he yearned to associate himself with the stability of the classical tradition, and the prestige of its authors. One could argue about the wisdom of attempting to translate certain classical concepts into seventeenth-century artifacts, but to consider Jonson outside of the classical tradition would be as anomalous as to ignore Herman Melville's interest in the sea.
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