Catherine Clive (née Raftor; 5 November 1711 – 6 December 1785) Catherine ‘Kitty’ Clive (1711–1785, active 1728–1769) 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.

Clive was the daughter of William Raftor (variant spelling: Rafter), 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 (2 January 1729) 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 (6 August 1731). 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 (1686), 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.

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 (1 June 1732). 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 (23 June 1732), 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 (1733) and of Regnard’s The Intriguing Chambermaid (1734), 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.