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. Background 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