Nahum Tate

The History of King Lear (Dodo Press) Nahum Tate

Nahum Tate (1652-1715) was an Irish poet, hymnist, and lyricist, who became England's poet laureate in 1692. He published a volume of poems in London in 1677, and became a regular writer for the stage. Brutus of Alba; or, The Enchanted Lovers (1678), a tragedy dealing with Dido and Aeneas, later adapted to the libretto for Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas (1689? ), and The Loyal General (1680), were followed by a series of adaptations from Elizabethan dramas. The History of King Lear (1687) was fitted with a happy ending in a marriage between Cordelia and Edgar. From John Fletcher he adapted The Island Princess (1687); from Chapman and Marston's Eastward Ho he derived The Cuckold's Haven (1685); and in 1707 he rewrote John Webster's White Devil. He wrote the words to a number of hymns, of which the most famous is the Christmas carol Song of the Angels at the Nativity of Our Blessed Saviour, more famously known by its opening line "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks". He also translated Syphilis Sive Morbus Gallicus, Girolamo Fracastoro's Latin pastoral poem on the subject of the disease of syphilis into English heroic couplets.