Clive forms Fielding's parts – Clive's stage personae and Cibber's interventions – actors rebel and Hint turns publicist – the mysterious case of George Clive – exit Fielding, re-enter James Miller

In throwing together The Mock Doctor, Henry Fielding had in June 1732 stumbled onto something Clive excelled in: French comedy. Its banter, lightning action, stock characters, and furtive asides allowed her to blaze forth in spoken as well as sung principal parts. Fielding, alert to these strengths, converted two more French comedies for her during the regular season that followed. The Miser and The Intriguing Chambermaid, unlike The Old Debauchees and The Covent Garden Tragedy, built on talents for which Clive had won applause, integrated her comic with her musical skills, and were runaway hits.

But theatrical wars overshadowed Clive's successes of the 1732–33 season. Furious that his own father had failed to make him co-manager as he expected, Theophilus Cibber led an actors’ rebellion from March 1733 against the new manager, John Highmore. In not joining Cibber's rebel company, Clive became subject to the first critical abuse of her career. A pamphlet charged her with advancing herself at the cost of others and so revealing her treacherous nature. Playwright and actor Edward Phillips blended this sketch of Clive into his hit comedy about Cibber's rebellion, casting her as ‘Miss Prudely Crotchet’. Fielding, who also did not follow Cibber, stoutly defended her, testifying to her sterling qualities and rewriting the part she took in his Author's Farce in ways that made its fiction fit with the ‘facts’ he gave out about her.

Clive, then still Catherine Raftor, mounted her own defence with an advantageous personal alliance. In October 1733 she married a member of a leading Shropshire family – or did she? Evidence suggests that her ‘husband’ George Clive loved men, and that their marriage was a fiction from the start. In March 1734 Cibber returned to Drury Lane, negotiating a post for himself as deputy manager and bringing with him the latest comedy by James Miller.