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. Successes and image wars 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