Clive's likeness and its parts – picturing Orphic powers – the Cibbers and Thomas Arne at Drury Lane – Phaeton falls and Clive rises – rival Pollies and Clive's victory – a truce between the Tragedy Queen and the Comic Muse

After the squabbles and publicity of the 1733–34 season, Clive's likeness became more briskly traded. Drury Lane management may well have been behind this business, for just as Clive began taking over more of Anne Oldfield's comic parts, portraitists were mapping Oldfield's body onto hers. Chance now threw more Oldfield parts into her lap: her three main rivals, Hester Booth, Christiana Horton, and Mary Heron, all disappeared from the scene. Booth, née Santlow, retired after selling her husband's patent share in September 1733. Horton, who had joined Theophilus Cibber's rebel company, crossed over to Covent Garden in September 1734 rather than return to Drury Lane. And in May 1735 Heron, dubbed in 1733 ‘the Inheritrix of Oldfield's Fame’, had a stage accident that forced her retirement. Further strengthening Clive's position, soon after March 1734 Fleetwood ‘displaced’ Cibber as deputy manager with someone she had no quarrels with, the Irish comic actor Charles Macklin. Brought in by John Highmore to replace actors absent during the revolt, Macklin had created ‘the Drunken Colonel’ in The Intriguing Chambermaid, stamping this work with his craft as Clive had with hers. When, from January 1736, four more of Oldfield's comic roles fell to Clive over the next two seasons, the casting may well have been Macklin's. As Clive appropriated Oldfield's roles, three different portraits of her appeared, all of which evoked Oldfield's person.

The portraitists faced a serious challenge. A plain woman, Clive bore as little resemblance to Oldfield as she had to Godfried Schalcken's seventeenthcentury shepherdess of the 1729 ‘Miss Rafter’ mezzotint. The truest of Clive's new likenesses, a mezzotint portrait of 1734, drew sharp criticism for being unflattering.