# The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, altered; with a prologue and chorus [and] The Tragedy of Marcus Brutus - in The Works of John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave, Marquis of Normanby, and Duke of Buckingham, vol. I

**Slug:** `sheffield_julius_caesar_1723`  
**Priority:** 3  
**Author:** John Sheffield, Duke of Buckingham  
**Edition / date:** London: printed for John Barber, 1723 (first collected Works, posthumous; the two tragedies were first printed here). Vol. II (prose) also downloaded but not extracted.

## Sources
- **archive.org** `bim_eighteenth-century_the-works-of-john-sheffi_buckingham-john-sheffie_1723_1` - https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-works-of-john-sheffi_buckingham-john-sheffie_1723_1
  - catalogue title: The works of John Sheffield, ... Duke of Buckingham.  1723: Vol 1
  - date field: 1723; images/frames: 471; OCR engine: tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920
  - digitised from / contributor: ['IA40313316-38', 'microfilm']
  - raw file(s) saved here (exactly as downloaded): `bim_eighteenth-century_the-works-of-john-sheffi_buckingham-john-sheffie_1723_1_djvu.txt`
  - note: Vol. I, 471 frames; plays at OCR lines 11749-24327
- **archive.org** `bim_eighteenth-century_the-works-of-john-sheffi_buckingham-john-sheffie_1723_2` - https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_the-works-of-john-sheffi_buckingham-john-sheffie_1723_2
  - catalogue title: The works of John Sheffield, ... Duke of Buckingham.  1723: Vol 2
  - date field: 1723; images/frames: 328; OCR engine: tesseract 5.3.0-3-g9920
  - digitised from / contributor: ['IA40313316-38', 'microfilm']
  - raw file(s) saved here (exactly as downloaded): `bim_eighteenth-century_the-works-of-john-sheffi_buckingham-john-sheffie_1723_2_djvu.txt`
  - note: Vol. II (prose; not extracted)

## Cleaned text(s)
- `sheffield_julius_caesar_1723.clean.txt` - Julius Caesar altered, with prologue and the choruses; 14,422 words; 97% of text lines pass a dictionary check
- `sheffield_marcus_brutus_1723.clean.txt` - Marcus Brutus (Sheffield's sequel play) - bonus; 15,228 words; 96% of text lines pass a dictionary check

## Completeness
Both plays 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).
The 1729 Works (worksjohnsheffi01buckgoog) and 1752 Poems on Several Occasions (poemsonseveraloc00buck) also contain both plays. Note that two of the choruses in Marcus Brutus ('Two Chorus's to the Tragedy of Brutus') are by Alexander Pope, not Sheffield; the Julius Caesar choruses are Sheffield's own.