# The Happy Captive, an English opera. With an interlude, in two comick scenes, betwixt Signor Capoccio ... and Signora Dorinna

**Slug:** `happy_captive_1741`  
**Priority:** 1  
**Author:** Lewis Theobald  
**Edition / date:** London: printed for J. Watts, 1741 (per ESTC). FIRST (only) edition.

## Sources
- **archive.org** `bim_eighteenth-century_the-happy-captive-an-en_theobald-mr_1741` - https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-happy-captive-an-en_theobald-mr_1741
  - catalogue title: The happy captive, an English opera. With an interlude, in two comick scenes, betwixt Signor Capoccio, ... and Signora Dorinna, ...  1741
  - date field: 1741; images/frames: 48; OCR engine: tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920
  - digitised from / contributor: ['IA40313615-83', 'microfilm']
  - raw file(s) saved here (exactly as downloaded): `bim_eighteenth-century_the-happy-captive-an-en_theobald-mr_1741_djvu.txt`
  - note: BL microfilm reel IA40313615-83; tesseract OCR.

## Cleaned text(s)
- `happy_captive_1741.clean.txt` - full volume: dedication, three acts of the opera with the comic interlude; 6,985 words; 87% of text lines pass a dictionary check

## Completeness
48 frames; complete (short opera libretto, c. 7,000 words).

## 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).
OCR noisier than average (many junk lines removed); sung verse mostly legible.