Kitty Clive

She was celebrated both in high-style parts – singing, for instance, Handel’s music for her in Messiah, Samson, and The Way of the World – and in low-style ballad opera roles.

Though this self-ridicule won Clive public favour back, and she reigned as first comedienne until her retirement in 1769, the strategy’s very success caused her musical legacy to be slighted and forgotten.

The wild popularity of Lincoln’s Inn Fields’ The Beggar’s Opera and its 17-year-old star Lavinia Fenton from January 1728 inspired Drury Lane manager Colley Cibber to hire his own 17-year-old soprano-actress.

[7] Clive’s singing master Henry Carey, who created her earliest vehicles, may also have had a hand in the audition: he had been Drury Lane’s composer from 1714 to 1717, and from 1723 had begun again to supply it with music.

[11] Through her performance of these numbers, Clive transformed her role – in the playbook an abused, submissive cobbler’s wife – into that of a sprightly heroine who enraptured audiences.

To showcase ‘Nell’ during the 1731-32 regular season, The Devil to Pay was swiftly cut down into a sentimental afterpiece with a climactic duet, arranged from a Handel aria, for Clive and Irish tenor Charles Stoppelaer.

During the 1730s Francis Hayman painted Clive in performance Nell; this huge oil, which was engraved several times, hung in the supper boxes at Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.

Fielding set this mock-tragedy in the Rose Tavern, an infamous brothel whose real-life personnel he lightly fictionalized, with Clive as the chief doxy.

Fielding, backed by summer manager Theophilus, had then to scramble to get up an ‘operatized’ version of Molière’s The Mock Doctor (23 June 1732), whose wife-beating scenes were co-extensive with the action of The Devil to Pay.

From 1733, several engravers printed Clive’s actual likeness; previously the only available image of ‘Miss Rafter’ had been a mezzotint of a half-naked nymph from a seventeenth-century oil.

In the ensuing court battle, Chief Justice Philip Yorke sided with Theophilus Cibber, who returned with his company in March 1734 to co-manage Drury Lane alongside a new investor, Charles Fleetwood.

During the rebellion Clive had been attacked in the press as ‘Miss Prudely Crotchet’, a scheming songster who pretended to modesty while arrogantly advancing her ambition.

[16] For weeks Clive fought Cibber in the press; an ad hominem stage burlesque of the conflict was published, in two versions to keep up with unfolding events.

Clive ultimately prevailed, winning over a hostile Drury Lane audience on 31 December 1736 with an extemporized stage speech, an event which testifies to her compelling presence as a performer.

While in Dublin Clive trained up a song in Irish Gaelic, and subsequently delivered the first-ever performance of this then-forbidden language on a licensed British stage.

Sung originally in propria persona (‘Miss Kitty’) in Miller’s The Coffee House, the air profiles Clive as a pert, rational, propitious female patriot calling for war against Spain.

‘Life of a Beau’ identifies the enemy at home as queer opera connoisseurs who lament the departure of the castrato Farinelli, who had in fact quit London for the Spanish court.

Clive and her followers, who included her singing partner John Beard and her protégée Mary Edwards, crossed over to Covent Garden only to find themselves doubly victimized: not only was Rich offering less than Fleetwood, but he also wouldn’t pay.

Clive’s first self-authored afterpiece, The Rehearsal, or Bayes in Petticoats (1750), championed female playwrights, and she occasionally led new comedies written by women, such as Frances Sheridan's The Dupe (1763) and Elizabeth Griffith’s The Platonick Wife (1765) and School for Rakes (1769).

Clive’s writings contain crucial evidence about her career, her reliance on Irish theatre personnel in London, and the 18th century British playhouse generally.

In a letter written Sept. 7, 1782 to Earl Harcourt, Walpole remarked, "Dame Cliveden is the only heroine amongst all us old dowagers; she is so much recovered that she ventures to go out cruising on all the neighbours, and has made a miraculous draught of fishes.