# The Persian Princess: or, the Royal Villain. A tragedy

**Slug:** `persian_princess_1715`  
**Priority:** 1  
**Author:** Lewis Theobald  
**Edition / date:** London: printed for Jonas Browne, 1715 (imprint legible in the OCR). FIRST (and only 18th-c.) edition; acted at Drury Lane 1708.

## Sources
- **archive.org** `bim_eighteenth-century_the-persian-princess-or_theobald-mr-lewis_1715` - https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-persian-princess-or_theobald-mr-lewis_1715
  - catalogue title: The Persian princess: or, the royal villain. A tragedy. As it was acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane. By Mr. Theobald.  1715
  - date field: 1715; images/frames: 85; OCR engine: tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920
  - digitised from / contributor: ['IA40312806-81', 'microfilm']
  - raw file(s) saved here (exactly as downloaded): `bim_eighteenth-century_the-persian-princess-or_theobald-mr-lewis_1715_djvu.txt`
  - note: British Library copy on 'The Eighteenth Century' microfilm (reel IA40312806-81); OCR = tesseract 5.3 run by IA.

## Cleaned text(s)
- `persian_princess_1715.clean.txt` - full volume: dedication, preface, prologue, dramatis personae, five acts, epilogue; 15,275 words; 88% of text lines pass a dictionary check

## Completeness
All 85 microfilm frames present in the OCR; front matter, five acts and epilogue all present. Microfilm target frames produce noise at start/end (trimmed).

## 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).
Quality is the weakest of the Theobald plays obtained (many broken lines in the preface/prologue frames); the dramatic verse itself is mostly legible.