Goethe was under the impression that Coleridge was working on, or had made, a translation of his Faust (The First Part of the Tragedy, which came out in 1808 and contains many of the most famous scenes in the play). No such translation was published under Coleridge's name in his lifetime, and Coleridge himself declared that he had never put pen to paper. He knew German. He translated Schiller. Many people, including Shelley, thought he would be an ideal translator for Faust. He is even on record as having entered into negotiations to translate Goethe's play.

But scholars who addressed the matter came to the conclusion that this was one of those Coleridge projects that simply never got off the ground. Coleridge's life was a mess, and this Faust mystery was just another part of the mess. You can imagine people thinking: poor old Goethe, yet another victim of Coleridge's internal chaos.

One scholar who took a different view was Paul M Zall, who in 1971 began to put together a case that Coleridge had indeed translated Faust, and published his work in 1821, but had done so anonymously. The version is not complete. It represents about half the lines of the original play, linked by a prose commentary that sums up the missing bits of the story. This anonymous version looks rather like one of the poetry reviews of the Romantic period, in which an immense number of chunks of a long poem are quoted with linking remarks. But the purpose in this case was to provide a text to accompany some engraved illustrations by an artist called Moritz Retzsch.

Why would Coleridge go to the length of translating Goethe and then pretend he hadn't done so? One reason is to do with the chaos in Coleridge's professional life, the other perhaps reflects the fear of chaos in his soul. The first reason was that he had already promised the translation to a different publisher and failed to deliver. The second reason was that, however much he admired Goethe, he thought this particular work was dangerously immoral and atheistic, and that his own reputation might be compromised through being associated with it.

When Zall announced his discovery, or theory, of Coleridge's authorship of the 1821 translation, he was congratulated by fellow scholars but told that his case "would be better made if made more reticently", and it was suggested that he should wait until a more thorough stylistic proof was available. So a generation passed before a modern edition was made by Frederick Burwick and James C McKusick. When Oxford University Press recently published this, I bought it at once, partly because I try to collect the good editions of Coleridge (an expensive hobby) and partly to see whether the text as it comes down to us could conceivably be performed on stage.

Coleridge, in common with so many of the English Romantics, was very interested in the stage. Unlike so many of them, he actually enjoyed a box-office success with a play called Remorse. Neither this nor any other English Romantic play survives in the modern theatrical repertoire. But Faust is certainly performable in German. Why not in an old translation by one who understood Goethe rather well, and who would have had the possibility of performance in mind?

The answer is not only that Coleridge's translation is too incomplete. It is also too fearful of giving offence. You can see that in the final scene, where Faust tries to spring Margareta (Gretchen) from prison. She is the innocent girl, the ballad-heroine Goethe added to the puppet-show story. Faust seduces her, persuading her to give her mother a sleeping-draft which is in fact poison. Gretchen also kills her daughter and is sentenced to death for doing so.

When Faust comes to the prison, he hears a voice within, singing, as Coleridge puts it, "a rude ballad, so gross as to indicate insanity". This ballad he omits. Here is David Luke's version (from the World's Classics edition):

Who killed me dead?

My mother, the whore!

Who ate my flesh?

My father, for sure!

Little sister gathered

The bones he scattered;

In a cool, cool place they lie.

And then I become a birdie so fine,

And away I fly - away I fly.

This is a version of a folk song, exactly like the sort of song Ophelia sings in her madness, and this first part of Faust ends with a mad scene inspired - as much of Faust is inspired - by the liberating spirit of Shakespeare. But Coleridge had no stomach for that, and his rendering of the famous spinning-wheel song is not distinguished.

The fate of Gretchen, public execution, is interesting. She foresees what will happen - that they bind her to an execution chair and cut her head off. This appears to be based on an actual case of infanticide, in which Susanna Margaretha Brandt, whose brother was a soldier (in the play, Faust kills him), was beheaded in 1772 in Frankfurt, 200 yards from the Goethe family home. The ceremonial, with the breaking of a white stick, the ringing bells and the victim tied to the chair, is evoked in Gretchen's speech. Goethe was 22 at the time of Susanna Brandt's execution and members of his family, so David Luke tells us, had been involved in the case.

A decade later, in London, women were still being burnt at the stake for killing their husbands (viewed as a form of treason). Looking for the date of the last burning at the stake, I read that the resistance to burning women at the stake (it was no longer a man's punishment) came from people who lived near Newgate prison, where the executions took place, who claimed that the smoke made them ill. So that the resistance to this form of punishment originated as a sort of pioneering Clean Air Act.

Goethe reserves the horrified anticipation of beheading for this magnificent last scene. It looks like a piece of medievalism, but is in fact justice as practised in the world in which the poet (and Coleridge) grew up.