# The Fatal Secret. A tragedy. As it is acted at the Theatre-Royal, in Covent-Garden. By Mr. Theobald

**Slug:** `fatal_secret_1735`  
**Priority:** 1  
**Author:** Lewis Theobald (adapted from Webster, The Duchess of Malfi)  
**Edition / date:** London: printed for J. Watts, 1735. FIRST (only) edition; acted 1733.

## Sources
- **archive.org** `bim_eighteenth-century_the-fatal-secret-a-trag_theobald-mr_1735` - https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-fatal-secret-a-trag_theobald-mr_1735
  - catalogue title: The fatal secret. A tragedy. As it is acted at the Theatre-Royal, in Covent-Garden. By Mr. Theobald.  1735
  - date field: 1735; images/frames: 73; OCR engine: tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920
  - digitised from / contributor: ['IA40313615-52', 'microfilm']
  - raw file(s) saved here (exactly as downloaded): `bim_eighteenth-century_the-fatal-secret-a-trag_theobald-mr_1735_djvu.txt`
  - note: BL microfilm reel IA40313615-52; tesseract OCR - UNUSABLE, see notes.

## Cleaned text(s)
- `fatal_secret_1735.clean_UNUSABLE.txt` - cleaner output kept only for the record; ~92% of lines are gibberish; 13,973 words; 42% of text lines pass a dictionary check

## Completeness
73 frames are present as images, but the OCR text is garbage for almost the whole play: only ~16 of 193 25-line blocks are legible English (none of the play's character names - Bosola, Antonio, Ferdinand, the Duchess - are recoverable by grep). The microfilm frames appear to have been photographed rotated/inverted, so IA's tesseract pass produced mirror-nonsense such as '2ajquuojzrajun 441 31 f op Baq oz ayBnc'.

## OCR quality / notes
Cleaning: IA djvu.txt was normalised (ſ->s), microfilm target frames and junk lines trimmed, page numbers/signatures/running heads dropped, end-of-line hyphenation joined, and a CONSERVATIVE long-s correction applied (words with 'f' that are not in a modern frequency list are replaced by their 's' variant when that variant is common; a short override list covers so/she/sir/see/such/some...). Ambiguous real words (fame/same, fell/sell, fold/sold, found/sound, foul/soul, fit/sit ...) were left unchanged. Statistics of every change are in the `*.cleanstats.json` beside each cleaned file. Expect residual OCR noise; the '% of lines pass a dictionary check' figure above is a rough legibility score (modern-English word list; 18th-c. spellings count against it).
No re-OCR of the page images was attempted. The page images (PDF) are at https://archive.org/download/bim_eighteenth-century_the-fatal-secret-a-trag_theobald-mr_1735 should anyone want to OCR them with rotation correction.
No other digitised copy located: no HathiTrust record (full inventory grep), no second archive.org copy (title/creator/date searches), Google Books not reachable from here. ECCO holds the BL copy.