The Indian Emperour,
or the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards,

being the sequel of The Indian Queen.
John Dryden 1703 printing of a play.

This is the oldest TypeWright enabled version included in 18thConnect, of a play first produced in 1665, and first printed in 1667.  The play went through various printings, and we have editable copies from 1703, 1709, 1710, 1721 (2), 1724, 1735, 1750, 1754, 1755, 1759 in 18thConnect.

18thCollect gives access to a total of 48 copies of this play, some in collected works, that range in date from 1667 to 1759, indicating that it continued to be popular well into the 18th century.  All these are from either ECCO or the British Library’s “English Short Title Collection.”

This printed version displays many of the difficulties that Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs encounter when applied to materials published in the 18th Century.  Most obvious is the long “s” which has been recognized as such in some instances here, but rendered incorrectly in others.  Another common rendering error replaces the combined c-t glyph with “&” or other interesting combinations.  Yet another common error for OCR rendered text, and one remarkably difficult to catch, renders lower-case “e” as lower-case “c.”

More errors arise when the scanned version shows extraneous black spots that appear for various reasons, from printing faults to soiling on the pages.  Such spots appear in ways that either obscure or mimic both letters and punctuation.

As you correct please remember, “If a word or portion of a word is illegible, type ‘@’ in its place; please do not make any guesses about what a word might be.”  If you have a question, or if you don’t, please remember to visit and contribute to our new discussion forum for “TypeWright Questions and Answers.”

Do you have a text you would like to suggest?  Tell us about it at our other new Forum “TypeWright ‘Featured Item’ Suggestions.”

Anne Arundel