Academic literature on the topic 'Weckherlin'

Der Aufsatz beschäftigt sich mit den Anfängen einer literaturgeschichtlichen Tradition, die statt in Martin Opitz den ‘Vater der deutschen Dichtung’ zu sehen, die Qualitäten des älteren Georg Rudolf Weckherlin hervorhebt. Dies geschieht ab der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts und besonders nachdrücklich dann bei Johann Gottfried Herder, Karl Philipp Conz und August Wilhelm Schlegel. Untersucht werden die Gründe, warum die Würdigung Weckherlins fast ausschließlich auf den Inhalt — den ‘Gehalt’ — von dessen Gedichten beschränkt bleibt, während die Opitzsche Versreform nicht in Frage gestellt wird und der Hinweis auf Weckherlin damit ohne Folgen für die dichterische Praxis bleibt.

The commitment of Charles I's government to press censorship and the rigour with which that censorship was enforced is the subject of the present essay. In 1627 Georg Rudolph Weckherlin, the Latin secretary to the privy council, became political licenser for the press. Over the next fourteen years he granted eighty-two licences and probably was responsible for many more. Drawing on his two office diaries, his personal correspondence, and the books and pamphlets to which he gave his imprimatur, this essay attempts a small portrait of a ‘royal censor’ in 1630s London. Although he occasionally allowed works implicitly critical of government policy, he appears to have been conscientious in his duties. (At least twice he approached Charles for his opinion about a licence.) Weckherlin's eventual loss of his licensing job to secretary of state Sir Francis Windebank's staff signalled the crown's interest in an even closer watch on printing and publishing. The evidence of Weckherlin's career suggests that in the decade before the Long Parliament Charles increasingly sought to curtail the power of the press.