# The Perfidious Brother, a tragedy. As it was acted at the New Theatre in Little Lincolns-Inn-Fields. Dedicated to Mr. Theobald

**Slug:** `mestayer_perfidious_brother_1720`  
**Priority:** 2  
**Author:** Henry Mestayer  
**Edition / date:** London, 1720. Mestayer's own version of the play Theobald had reworked in 1715 (with a dedication attacking Theobald). Calibration/contrast item, not by Theobald.

## Sources
- **archive.org** `bim_eighteenth-century_the-perfidious-brother-_mestayer-henry_1720` - https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-perfidious-brother-_mestayer-henry_1720
  - catalogue title: The perfidious brother, a tragedy. As it was acted, at the New Theatre in Little Lincolns-Inn-Fields. Dedicated to Mr. Theobald.  1720
  - date field: 1720; images/frames: 62; OCR engine: tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920
  - digitised from / contributor: ['IA40316215-69', 'microfilm']
  - raw file(s) saved here (exactly as downloaded): `bim_eighteenth-century_the-perfidious-brother-_mestayer-henry_1720_djvu.txt`
  - note: 62 frames

## Cleaned text(s)
- `mestayer_perfidious_brother_1720.clean.txt` - 15,081 words; 96% of text lines pass a dictionary check

## Completeness
Complete.

## 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).