It is one of the minor ironies of literary history that Nahum Tate's small claim to fame is for having the audacity to attempt to "improve" Shakespeare's plays, most egregiously King Lear. His contemporaries found him anything but audacious; Charles Gildon is typical in his referring to "a Person of great Probity of Manners, Learning, and good Nature," whose relative lack of success in the world came from being "guilty of Modesty," since "it is the noisy pushing Man in Poetry, as well as other things, that prevails with Fame as well as Fortune." Modest in manners, Tate possessed abilities to match. The "life" published under the name of Theophilus Cibber in Lives of the Poets (1753) repeated concisely the commonplace view of Tate's limitations: He was "a man of learning, courteous and candid, but was thought to possess no great genius, as being deficient in what is its...