Mrs ‘Kitty’ Clive
Kitty Clive as Mrs Riot
The portrait shows Mrs ‘Kitty’ Clive as Mrs Riot in a scene from David Garrick’s play Lethe. It depicts "a grove, with a view of the River Lethe," and Mrs Riot has already arrived in Elysium, the seventh visitor of the day after the Poet, the Old Man, a Fine Gentleman, Mr and Mrs Tattoo, and a Frenchman. She thinks Aesop very ugly and demands the pump-room, thinking Elysium a fashionable watering place: "Show me to the pump-room, then, fellow - where's the Company? I die in solitude." Aesop tries to philosophise with her, but she gives him a receipt for the vapours and sings a song "The card invites, in crowds we fly / To join the jovial rout full cry".
Kitty Clive was the first playhouse performer to make music the basis for her stardom. She was an accomplished singer and friend of Handel. Her star performances encompassed a range of musical tastes from operatic pyrotechnics, to smart airs and raw street ballads. She broke through hierarchies of taste with this range.
Born Kitty Raftor, she married George Clive a barrister, part of the Shropshire Clive family. The marriage was short lived as they both preferred partners of their own sex, however the title ‘Mrs’ added to Kitty’s respectability. It also gave her some counter against the men who saw her as self-sufficient, self-conceited, arrogant and insolent. She was certainly highly ambitious and unusually proactive for an actress at that time. She was determined to be ‘respected, to dress well and be the centre of her own world.’
As a comedic actress she made her debut in 1728 and survived several stormy passages in the theatre, especially a long tussle with Susannah Cibber for leading roles. Garrick took over Drury Lane in 1747 and in order to maintain her earnings Clive allowed herself to be cast in mostly pantomime and satirical roles, going on to act with him for 22 years.
Clive has not been treated well by history, but her complex and fascinating biography has recently been reassessed by Berta Joncas:
Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster by Berta Joncus, 2019 https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvd58s59
See Ellen Moody’s blog for 2 epilogues written for Clive:
Guest entry by Berta Joncus in All Things Georgian
https://georgianera.wordpress.com/2020/04/08/who-was-kitty-clive-guest-post-by-dr-berta-joncus/