Kitty Clive
Catherine Clive Catherine ‘Kitty’ Clive was a first songster and star comedienne of British playhouse entertainment. Clive led and created new forms of English musical theatre. 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. Her likeness was printed and traded in unprecedented volume. She championed women’s rights throughout her career.
An image crisis in the late 1740s forced Clive to quit serious song and instead lampoon herself on stage. 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. A definitive biography of Clive by Berta Joncus appeared in 2019.
Background
Clive was the daughter of William Raftor, a dispossessed Jacobite Catholic landowner from Kilkenny, Ireland who emigrated to London and married Elizabeth Daniell, a leather-seller’s daughter. The precise date of Clive’s birth and her baptismal name are unclear: historians have noted the baptismal record of 'Ellenor Raftor,' 15 July 1711, in the Registers of St Paul’s Covent Garden, and proposed that her name had been changed from Ellenor to Catherine. However it has been more recently discovered that Eleanor, daughter of William Rafter, was buried 30 January 1713/14, as recorded in the burial register of St Giles in the Fields. Clive wrote late in life that she had been born on 15 November 1711. She may have been born one or two years earlier, as the marriage allegation for her marriage to George Clive in 1731 stated she was a "spinster aged upwards of twenty one years."Clive’s earliest biographer, Drury Lane prompter William Chetwood, relates how she first came to perform at that theatre. 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. Clive auditioned for Cibber at the instigation of his son Theophilus and of Chetwood, who was the younger Cibber’s housemate. 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.
Unlike Fenton, Clive was a gifted and professionally trained musician. For her official debut she played Dorinda in The Tempest, singing the Purcellian air ‘Dear pretty Youth’. English airs, in masques especially, quickly became central to Clive’s repertory. Later that month Cibber launched his own form of ballad opera, a ‘pastoral’ which, with Clive leading its comic subplot, was meant to compete with The Beggar’s Opera. Titled Love in Riddle, it came close to being hissed of the boards on its first night – a fate it avoided, by report, only because of the charm of Clive’s singing.
Clive’s popular breakthrough in ballad opera would not come until two and a half years later, when she first played Nell in The Devil to Pay. This was a production of the Drury Lane Summer Company, an ad hoc group performing after the regular season and run by Theophilus Cibber. The Irish player Charles Coffey helped ‘operatize’ an old farce called The Devil of a Wife, which extolled wife-beating. It was almost certainly Coffey who both chose the piece’s polite common tunes and wrote its spirited verses for Clive. 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. The Clive-centred afterpiece version of The Devil to Pay was later translated and exported to Paris and Leipzig, where it seeded the new genres of opéra comique and Singspiel''.
Successes and image wars
In the wake of Clive’s acclaim as Nell, the Cibbers father and son began from 1732 to mount a series of Clive comic vehicles written by Henry Fielding, whose 1730 ballad opera The Author’s Farce at a fringe theatre had made a splash. Fielding’s Clive vehicles departed sharply from the vocal and stage lines Carey had until then helped create for his former pupil. Instead of Anglicized high-style airs, Fielding reset low common tunes, rich in sexual innuendo. Instead of sprightly, upright heroines, Fielding’s dramatis personae for Clive lost their maidenheads, their morals, and their minds. Fielding botched Clive’s first-ever spoken principal part, The Covent Garden Tragedy. 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. Audiences recoiled, and the show closed. Fielding, backed by summer manager Theophilus, had then to scramble to get up an ‘operatized’ version of Molière’s The Mock Doctor, whose wife-beating scenes were co-extensive with the action of The Devil to Pay. A hit, The Mock Doctor ushered in Clive’s new line of smart female protagonists in translated French comedies. This stage type was to be mined throughout her career by Fielding, later Clive vehicle writers, and Clive herself. In his adaptation of Molière’s The Miser and of Regnard’s The Intriguing Chambermaid, Fielding cemented Clive’s ownership of precocious chambermaid roles. 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 spring of 1733 Clive became embroiled in her first clash with theatre managers. Theophilus Cibber, angered not to have inherited the management of Drury Lane from his father, persuaded most of its players to quit and join his rival company. Clive stayed on at Drury Lane – possibly to gain new parts, particularly those formerly owned by recently deceased star comedienne Anne Oldfield – as did Fielding, who continued to write Clive vehicles. 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. Fielding had defended Clive, praising her real and imagined qualities in his playbook introductions.
Appearing on a theatre bill dated 5 October 1733 for the first time as 'Mrs. Clive,' she was assumed to have married in 1733 the non-practicing barrister George Clive, scion of Shropshire landed gentry and uncle of the later Major-General Robert Clive. The marriage actually took place on 30 March 1731 at the church of St Mary le Savoy. This marriage was almost certainly a sham, from Kitty’s side to win a respectable name while shielding her earnings from any husband, from George’s side to disguise his passionate interest in men; George Clive went on to live with an older barrister who left him a considerable inheritance.
In 1734 the Molière translator James Miller supplanted Fielding as Drury Lane’s writer of Clive vehicles. Miller’s respect for Clive’s onstage brilliance materialized in his brittle French-sourced parts and witty epilogues for her; these included The Coffee House, whose ‘Life of a Beau’ – Carey wrote the music, Miller the words – became one of Clive’s, and the era’s, most celebrated songs.
In November 1736 Clive again opposed Theophilus Cibber, who wished to give to his new wife Susannah roles understood to belong to Clive, starting with Polly in The Beggar’s Opera. 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.
From 1738 to 1743 Clive was at the zenith of her stardom as Britain’s first songster. Her song and vehicles circulated nationally in print. Comus – a music vehicle for Clive as Euphrosyne, and a spoken one for Susannah Cibber, and Irish tragedienne James Quin – took London by storm, and toured to Dublin in summer of 1741. 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. In London, from 1738 Clive established herself as a leading Shakespearean comedienne in revivals often instigated by the Shakespeare Ladies Club. Clive’s Portia opposite Charles Macklin’s Shylock in The Merchant of Venice entered stage lore. Handel gifted Clive an air for her 1740 season benefit – the only such composition of his career – setting for her ‘Love’s but a Frailty’ from Congreve’s The Way of the World. Handel then engaged Clive to lead his 1743 oratorio company. Handel wrote the role of Delilah in Samson to Clive’s stage line and reputation, and gave her a brief bespoke solo in Messiah.
Clive added ‘Life of a Beau’ to her parts seemingly at will. This air captures her public profile. Sung originally in propria persona 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. Apart from their popularity, Clive’s repeated, self-instigated staging of homophobia may have helped screen the irregularity of her arrangement with George Clive.