ffectually wipe off that odious
Appellation of Vagabonds, which has been sometimes given them."[16] The
licensing act, subsequent cartel, and mistreatment of players were then
not only in the mind of Mrs. Clive. Treated in most of the arguments for
or against the players was salary, but it was only a cover hiding an
underlying malaise.

Implying that the managers set out to ruin certain performers, including
herself, Mrs. Clive accuses them of putting on "a better Face to the
Town" by publishing (inaccurate) salary figures--a ploy to get public
sanction for lower salaries. Mrs. Clive alludes to salaries published
ostensibly by Fleetwood in the papers (e.g., _Gentleman's Magazine_,
XIII, October 1743, 553), where the pay of such lights as Garrick,
Macklin, Pritchard, and Clive in the 1742-1743 season is made to seem
higher than the salaries of such worthies as Wilks, Betterton, Cibber,
and Oldfield in the 1708-1709 season. The actors, in presenting their
case (_Gentleman's Magazine_, XIII, November 1743, 609), hit at
Fleetwood for citing 1708-1709 salaries, for "the Stage [then] both of
_Drury-Lane_ and the _Hay-market_, were in so wretched a Condition ...
as not to be worth any body's Acceptance." The players use instead
salaries of the 1729 players "to place the salaries of the present
Actors in a true light," since the stage in that year flourished. In
1729, Wilks, the highest paid actor, earned more than his later equal,
Garrick. All other principals' salaries were comparable.

The main complaint of Fleetwood's company, then, was not only base
salary but the "Fallacy" of the manager's account and his "setting down
besides the Manager's Charges, every benefit Night, what is got by the
Actor's own private Interests in Money and Tickets, as also the Article
of 50L for Cloaths, added to the Actresses Account, which is absolutely
an Advantage to the Manager, as they always lay out considerably more."
This evidence, if not in itself damning to Fleetwood's designs toward
his actors, at least indicates the internecine breach at Drury Lane.
(The inter-theater conflict, important for its effect on repertory and
morale, is adequately examined in theater histories and lies outside my
interests in this essay.)

Mrs. Clive admits, however, that reduced, unpaid, or "handled" salaries
were not the first fear of the actors; it was instead, she says, the
fear of what "would happen from an Agreement supposed to be concluded
betwixt