as the Arcadian shepherdess Phillida in a series of ballad operas; they provoked Clive’s later friend Horace Walpole to complain that Handel was hiring ‘goddesses from farces’. Clive added ‘Life of a Beau’ to her parts seemingly at will. This air captures her public profile. 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. Apart from their popularity, Clive’s repeated, self-instigated staging of homophobia may have helped screen the irregularity of her arrangement with George Clive. Image crisis By the early 1740s Clive was the Drury Lane company’s top-paid player, and this precipitated her gravest career crisis. Charles Fleetwood, by now manager, was a gambling addict who began diverting the wages of company members to pay his debts. By 1743 Clive was desperate. She, Macklin and rising star David Garrick incited their fellow players to quit – but, due to the Licensing Act of 1737, which banned all but the two licensed playhouses, and to collusion between the managers of these two playhouses – the rebel players become homeless. Fleetwood had struck a deal with Covent Garden manager John Rich to either refuse employment to the rebels or hire them at lower salaries. 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. A press war raged, particularly after Garrick returned to Drury Lane after having vowed (according to Macklin) to act only in concert with the other rebel players. Clive defended herself in the pamphlet The Case of Mrs. Clive (1744). In response, Fleetwood charged Clive and Garrick with earning above their social station, and published Clive’s annual income of about £700 (something like £140,000 today). With this disclosure, earlier assertions that Clive was greedy, vain, and jealous gained new currency, and overshadowed her eventual return to Drury Lane. An illustrated ballad of 1746 pretended to report on a ‘Scuffle’ in the green room between the male supporters of Clive and rival comedienne Peg Woffington, and that same year