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. 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 (‘Clive of India’). The marriage actually took place on 30 March, 1731 at the church of St Mary le Savoy.This marriage was almost certainly