Nahum Tate

Nahum Tate (1652–1715) was an Anglo-Irish poet, dramatist, editor, and royal officeholder. Born in Dublin, he studied at Trinity College Dublin and graduated B.A. in 1672 before moving to London and making his living as a professional writer. His literary work ranged from poetry and drama to adaptation and translation. He is remembered in literary history for his rewritten version of Shakespeare's King Lear, for work associated with Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, and for collaborations with John Dryden. Tate was appointed Poet Laureate in 1692 and royal historiographer in 1702.

His most enduring contribution to congregational song came through collaboration with the Church of Ireland clergyman Nicholas Brady. Their A New Version of the Psalms of David, first published in 1696 and subsequently revised and supplemented, offered metrical English psalms for church singing and circulated widely in Britain and Ireland. The 1700 Supplement to that collection included the nativity paraphrase beginning “While shepherds watch'd their flocks by night.” Later hymnals commonly assigned the carol to Tate alone, but the 1700 printing did not attach his name to the individual hymn, and modern hymnological research therefore treats sole authorship as traditional rather than demonstrated.

Tate's reputation in church music rests largely on the long afterlife of the Tate-and-Brady psalter and a small number of texts that outlived most of his dramatic writing. He died in London in 1715.