Johnson, Horace
Walpole, Goldsmith, fellow players, contemporary memoir writers, and
audiences who admired her.[3] Dr. Johnson, I feel, gives the most
balanced, just contemporary appraisal of Mrs. Clive the actress: "What
Clive did best, she did better than Garrick; but could not do half so
many things well; she was a better romp than any I ever saw in
nature."[4] Part of the half she could not do well were tragedy roles,
attested to by Thomas Davies, who comments on her performances as
Ophelia in _Hamlet_ and Zara in _The Mourning Bride_: "Of Mrs. Clive's
Ophelia I shall only say, that I regret that the first comic actress in
the world should so far mistake her talents as to attempt it." And on
Zara, "for her own benefit, the comic Clive put on the royal robes of
Zara: she found them too heavy, and, very wisely, never wore them
afterwards."[5] Part of the half she could do well is noticed, once
again, by Davies: particularly adroit and distinguished in chambermaid
parts, Mrs. Clive
excelled also in characters of caprice and affectation, from the
high-bred Lady Fanciful to the vulgar Mrs. Heidelberg; in country
girls, romps, hoydens and dowdies, superannuated beauties, viragos
and humourists; she had an inimitable talent in ridiculing the
extravagant action and impertinent consequence of an
Opera-singer--of which she gave an excellent specimen in _Lethe_.
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