SOURCE: Gray, James. “‘More Blood than Brains’: Robert Dodsley and the Cleone Affair.” Dalhousie Review 54 (summer 1974): 207-27.

In the following essay, Gray describes the rivalry between two London theater companies and how it affected the writing, staging, and critical reception of Dodsley's Cleone.

When Robert Dodsley's tragedy Cleone opened at Covent Garden on Saturday evening, December 2, 1758, one of the most heated controversies in the history of the London stage came to the boiling point.¹ Once in service as a footman and now in business as a bookseller, Dodsley had earned the distinction of ranging some of the great names in eighteenth-century letters both for and against his play. For it, at one time or another, were Alexander Pope, Lord Lyttelton, the Earl of Chesterfield, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, Richard Graves, and William Shenstone.² Against it were David Garrick, William Warburton, Dr. John (“Inspector”) Hill, and Mrs. Theophilus Cibber...