The Black Servant and Kitty Clive: Unsettling Relations in the Playhouse

High Life below Stairs (1759), a stage hit and precursor to upstairs/downstairs entertainment like Downton Abbey, was led by Kitty Clive in propria persona. Having recovered audience favour from 1750, Clive was given this tailored part within a campaign for her to reclaim her dramatic line in smart chambermaids. But more broadly, playwright James Townley aimed for his farce to attack the immorality of sugar plantation owners, a lesson that crystallizes in Clive’s air ‘The Fellow Servant, or All in a Livery’. This air asserts that the actual servant is the privileged employer, ‘slave’ to their excesses – a radical view, and, I argue, an Abolitionist song avant le lettre.

While Clive’s music and dialogue erased distinctions between those above and below stairs, actual domestics attending the 1759 first run of High Life below Stairs were offended, apprehending the misconduct of its servant dramatis personae as attacks on their reputation. Their playhouse riots gave manager Garrick, and later the gentry, grounds for curtailing servant freedoms in the playhouse. The farce also became the fictional frame for a series of increasingly racialized illustrations titled High Life below Stairs. Clive’s song about ‘Liberty’ seems to have been forgotten in Britain. Stage records suggest, however, the song assumed its own life in American eighteenth-century colonial playhouses.