NAHUM

See also:

• TATE, JAMES (1771-1843)
• NAHUM TATE (1652-1715)
• TATE, RALPH (1840-1901)
• TATE, SIR HENRY, BART

TATE (1652-1715)  , English poet laureate and playwright, was born in Dublin in 1652 . He was the son of Faithful Teate (as the name was spelt), who wrote a quaint poem on, the Trinity entitled Ter Tria . Nahum Tate was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, graduating B.A. in 1672 . He published a volume of poems in London in 1677, and became a regular writer for the stage . Brutus of Alba, or The En-chanted Lovers (1678), a tragedy dealing with Dido and Aeneas, and The Loyal General (168o), were followed by a series of adaptations from Elizabethan dramas . In Shakespeare's Richard II. he altered the names of the personages, and changed the text so that every scene, to use his own words, was " full of respect to Majesty and the dignity of courts"; but in spite of these precautions The Sicilian Usurper (1681) was suppressed on the third representation on account of a possible political interpretation . King Lear (1687) was fitted with a happy ending in a marriage between Cordelia and Edgar; and Coriolanus became the Ingratitude of a Commonwealth (1682) . From John Fletcher he adapted The Island Princess (1687); from Chapman and Marston's Eastward Ho he derived the Cuckold's Haven (1685); from John Webster's White Devil he took Injured Love, or The Cruel Husband (pr . 1707); and Sir Aston Cockayne's Trappolin suppos'd a Prince he imitated in Duke and no Duke (1685) . Tate's name is chiefly connected with these mangled versions of other men's plays . and with the famous New Version of the Psalms of David (1696), in which he collaborated with Nicholas Brady . A supplement was licensed in 1703 . Some of these hymns, notably " While Shepherds watched," and " As pants the hart," rise above the general dull level, and are said to be Tate's work .

Tate was commissioned by

Dryden to write the Second Part of Absalom and Achitophel . The portraits of Elkanah Settle and Thomas Shadwell, however, are attributed to Dryden, who probably also put the finishing touches to the poem . Of his numerous poems the most original is Panacea, a poem on Tea <1700) . In spite of his consistent Toryism, he succeeded Shadwell as poet laureate in 1692 . He died within the precincts of the Mint, Southwark, where he had taken refuge from his creditors, on the 12th of August 1715 .