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Notes
A Key (With the Whip), bound and continuously paged with A Whip for the Fools Back ([London], 1682), pp. 25-26. The identification of the author as "a Non-conformist Parson" is Dryden's in "An Epistle to the Whig" before The Medal. Samuel Halkett and John Laing, A Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Literature, II (1883), attribute the Key to Christopher Nesse.
Biographia Britannica, 2nd ed., IV (1789), 264*. See Edmond Malone, The Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of John Dryden (1800), I, i, 145-150; William Dougal Christie, A Life of Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury, 1621-1683 (1871), II, 177-178.
The volume collates π2A2 (A2 signed (C1) B2 (quired within A2) [C]2 (—C1) D-I2. The contents are π1 blank; π2r title page; A1r-v "To the Reader"; B1r-I2v text.
The Works of John Dryden, II (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1972), 411-412.
Professor Dearing does not explain why the compositor did this. Unless we are to assume simple inadvertence, may it not be that the catchword "Not" was used so that the cancellans leaf would be sure to find its correct place, before the cancellandum (which would later be removed), when the gatherings were put together?
One place we might expect to have such a presentation mentioned is Richard Mulys' letter of November 19, 1681 to a member of the Duke of Ormond's household (Historical Manuscripts Commission [of Great Britain], Ormonde, n.s., 6 [1911], 233). On Mulys' possession of "inside information" see Wallace Maurer, "Who Prompted Dryden to Write Absalom and Achitophel?", PQ, 40 (1961), 131-132.
The Works of John Dryden, ed. Sir Walter Scott, rev. George Saintsbury, VI (1883), 9-10; VIII (1884), 135.
James Kinsley, in fact, denies that any such awkwardness exists, The Poems of John Dryden (1958), IV, 1884.
See Macdonald, p. 23; Kinsley, IV, 1878; Calif. Works, II, 412. That C1v (with the changes in the first line indicated in Calif. Works, II, 412, 416) was printed from the standing type of the first edition is my own observation based on a comparison of the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library copies of the first (first and third state) and second editions.
One explanation for why the type of only the outer forme of A1.C1 was left standing is that A1.C1 was printed, inner forme first, after E, and the decision to leave type standing was made after the type of the inner forme had been distributed.
"Almost irrelevant," because, presumably, a cut that destroyed the sense of its context would not have been made.
A. L. French, "Dryden, Marvell and Political Poetry," SEL, 8 (1968), 403-404, makes a similar point.
The reader may wonder at the shift in tone between l. 166 and l. 173, which follows it in my reconstruction. Perhaps the character of Shaftesbury (ll. 159-166) was itself absent from the earliest draft of the poem. Monmouth has no formal character, and in The Medal Dryden was content to delineate Shaftesbury by recounting his career, as he does in ll. 173-197 here. If Dryden had not originally given a character of Shaftesbury it would be logical for him to decide to add one after writing those of the leading Whigs, French's challenge to the unity of the Achitophel lines (loc. cit.), if accepted, would offer some support to this hypothesis of double revision.
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