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Notes
I do not feel that Brown has been particularly fortunate in his choice of an example to enforce his argument here. He cites a speech by Hippolito from The Honest Whore, Part 2 (1630, sig. A4, in Bowers's edition of Dekker I.i.123-7), calling attention to 'a few abnormally long spaces between words' in the line (set as prose) 'old Iacomo sonne to the Florentine Iacomo, a dog, that to'. I find nothing significant in the spacing of this line, which seems no more 'abnormally long' in this respect than many other lines on the same page and on adjacent pages. Although he makes play with the fact that a Malone Society editor 'must always normalize the spacing of his text' (which seems to me to be an eminently sensible thing to do in a text which is also meant to be read by people not primarily interested in purely bibliographical matters), he does not, apparently, admit that any Malone Society editor worth his salt would, on noticing a genuine and significant example of abnormal spacing in his text, draw attention to the fact in his Introduction. In fact, on almost all occasions on which Brown quotes Malone Society Rules agains the Society, he seems to overlook the fact that these are concerned with the actual presentation of the text, and that editors have very considerable powers of discretion concerning what shall go into their introductions; powers of which a good editor will take full advantage.
When I reviewed the first volume of Bowers's Dekker (The Library, IX (1954), 139-142) I raised some points not unlike those raised by Brown now. Bowers was kind enough to reply (The Library, X (1955), 130-133); the whole of his letter is important, but one sentence is particularly relevant here: 'I hold it incumbent on a critical old-spelling editor to provide for the reader the entire body of evidence from which he derived his text in so far as this relates to the pertinent early documents.' Later in the same letter he adds: 'Any critical scholar utilizing the text should appreciate having all pertinent information within his grasp so that he is not at the mercy of the editor's judgement as to what he will be told of editorial alterations from the most authoritative original document(s) containing the text.' This position I now accept, along with its implications of editorial responsibility; for the notion of 'every man his own bibliographer', which seems to be in Brown's mind in his emphasis upon the provision of photographic facsimiles to all and sundry, is, in the circumstances of modern bibliographical knowledge and technique, untenable.
It is true, that so far such explanatory notes have been kept to an absolute minimum in Bowers's Dekker, but in the letter to which I have already referred (note 4 above) Bowers has explained the reason for this and has stated (a statement which is supported by the Cambridge University Press) that it is the intention to follow the text in later volume(s) with appropriate critical and historical essays and notes by another hand.
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