Works
Tate 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, was dedicated to Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset; it was later adapted to the libretto for Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas (1689?). The Loyal General, with a prologue by Dryden, played at the Dorset Garden Theatre in 1680.
Tate then turned to make a series of adaptations from Elizabethan dramas. His version of William Shakespeare's Richard II altered the names of the characters, 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), as his rewrite was called, was suppressed on the third performance on account of a possible political interpretation. In 1681 Thomas Betterton played Tate's version of King Lear, which entirely omitted the Fool, and ended happily in marriage between Cordelia and Edgar. (Though Joseph Addison protested at this mutilation of Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson defended the poetic justice of Tate's adaptation.) Coriolanus became The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth, played at the Theatre Royal in 1682. Tate's farce Duke and no Duke (first printed 1685, but acted earlier at the Theatre Royal) imitated Sir Aston Cockayne's Trappolin suppos'd a Prince. His The Cuckold's Haven (performed 1685 at the Theatre Royal) was derived from Chapman and Marston's Eastward Ho. The Island Princess, or the Generous Portugals (1687) was adapted from John Fletcher. Injur'd Love, or the Cruel Husband (1707), altered from Webster's The White Devil, seems never to have been acted.
In 1682 Tate collaborated with John Dryden to complete the second half of his epic poem Absalom and Achitophel.
Tate wrote the libretto for Henry Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas which was given its first known performance in 1689. He also wrote the text for Purcell's Birthday Ode Come Ye Sons of Art in 1694. Tate also translated Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus, Girolamo Fracastoro's Latin pastoral poem on the subject of the disease of syphilis into English heroic couplets.
Tate's name is also connected with the famous New Version of the Psalms of David (1696), in which he collaborated with ]. Some items such as "As pants the hart" (Psalm 42) rise above the general level, and are said to be Tate's work. A supplement was licensed in 1703 which included the Christmas carol "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks", one of a number of hymns by Tate.
His poems were sharply criticized by Alexander Pope in The Dunciad.
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, in 1715.
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“Again we mistook a little rocky islet seen through the “drisk,” with some taller bare trunks or stumps on it, for the steamer with its smoke-pipes, but as it had not changed its position after half an hour, we were undeceived. So much do the works of man resemble the works of nature. A moose might mistake a steamer for a floating isle, and not be scared till he heard its puffing or its whistle.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)