# The Perfidious Brother. A tragedy: as it is acted at the New Theatre in Little Lincolns-Inn-Fields. By Mr. Theobald

**Slug:** `perfidious_brother_1715`  
**Priority:** 1  
**Author:** Lewis Theobald (revising a draft by Henry Mestayer)  
**Edition / date:** London: printed for Jonas Browne, 1715 (imprint per ESTC; not legible in this OCR). FIRST edition of Theobald's version. Archive.org/ESTC catalogue it under Mestayer, Henry as creator; the title page says 'By Mr. Theobald'.

## Sources
- **archive.org** `bim_eighteenth-century_the-perfidious-brother-_mestayer-henry_1715` - https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-perfidious-brother-_mestayer-henry_1715
  - catalogue title: The perfidious brother, a tragedy: as it is acted at the New Theatre in Little Lincolns-Inn-Fields. By Mr. Theobald.  1715
  - date field: 1715; images/frames: 69; OCR engine: tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920
  - digitised from / contributor: ['IA40312802-38', 'microfilm']
  - raw file(s) saved here (exactly as downloaded): `bim_eighteenth-century_the-perfidious-brother-_mestayer-henry_1715_djvu.txt`
  - note: BL 'Eighteenth Century' microfilm reel IA40312802-38; tesseract OCR.

## Cleaned text(s)
- `perfidious_brother_1715.clean.txt` - full volume incl. Theobald's preface defending his authorship, prologue, five acts, epilogue; 12,378 words; 93% of text lines pass a dictionary check

## Completeness
69 frames; 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).
Compare mestayer_perfidious_brother_1720 (Mestayer's own text, 'Dedicated to Mr. Theobald', 1720) which was also downloaded for contrast.