Coleridge Writes in Code: Can We Crack It?

Dan Brown eat your heart out.

So the lecture on Othello, delivered 21 January 1819 in London (and which contains one of my favourite nuggets of Coleridgean Shakespeare-criticism, when he describes Iago's speeches as 'the motive-hunting of a motiveless Malignity') is lost to us except for various notes STC made in his edition of Shakespeare. Some of these are quite lengthy, and they end with the following:

But in truth, it is a mere accident of Terms in the first place; for the Trilogy of the Greek theatre was a drama in three acts, and notwithstanding this, the strange contrivances as to place, as in the FROGS. There is no lack of instances in the Greek tragedies—the allowance extorted of 24 hours—is if, perception once violated, it was more difficult to imagine three three hours to be three years than to be a whole day and night. Aeschylus’ AGAMEMNON furnishes a fine instance of this.

There is a danger in introducing into a situation of great interest one for whom you had no previous Interest. Φρϛφρρ Iωαν

Nobody knows what that last little bit of Greek means. It transliterates as Frsfrr Iōan, or if you prefer as Phrsphrr Iōan, the first bit of which doesn't mean anything in Greek, or in any other language (the second bit is the Greek for 'John'). Foakes is frankly baffled: 'The sentence and C's cipher are unexplained' [CC 5.2, 317] and floats the theory that it might refer to John Thelwall, which strikes me as unpersuasive, Or indeed, as clearly wrong.

So what is going on here? I have two theories, one I consider less and one slightly more likely. The less likely is that the Greek picks up on the reference to Aristophanes' Frogs from earlier in the notes. For this to be true, the rendering of the Greek would have to altered, on the understanding that Coleridge's 'ω's could be written so roughly as to be confusable with his 'ρ's: the word would then be 'φωσφόρ[ος] ‎(phōsphóros, light-bearer, light-carrier; also the name of the Morning Star, from φῶς ‎(phôs, light) + φέρω ‎('to bear, to carry'). Maybe φωσφωρ Iωαν might be a mangled jotting-down of Aristophanes' Ἴακχ φωσφόρος from Frogs 342-3?

Ἴακχ᾽ ὦ Ἴακχε,
νυκτέρου τελετῆς φωσφόρος ἀστήρ.

This is the choral address to Iacchus, and it means: 'Iacchus, O Iacchus/Shining star of our night-time rituals!' It is not immediately clear to me what this has to do with the rest of Coleridge's point. Also the reading relies on rewriting the actual Greek, which is not ideal in code-busting terms.

So that brings me to the second, and I think more likely theory. Iωαν is John, and writing it in Greek is Coleridge's way of shorthanding the Gospel of Saint John (written, of course, in Greek). Φρϛφρρ would presumably be a way of coding a specific passage. It's hard to see which one, though. The weird use of a terminal sigma (ϛ) in the middle of the word (it should be a σ, of course) makes me think that this is actually two words: Φρϛ and φρρ. That doesn't exactly help us, though. If Φρϛ is Φωϛ (light), then there is an obvious Johannine connection, since that Gospel is full of references to Christ as the light. But that doesn't solve what φρρ might be referring to, or what it has to do with the broader point being made. The Greek gospel is divided into sections marked with letters, but they don't go as high as any of the letters Coleridge notates. Chapter 3 of the Gospel concerns a doubting Pharisee ('τῶν Φαρισαίων'): might Coleridge's 'Φρϛ' be a shortened version of that word? Is this some oblique reference to the introduction of the Pharisee characters into John's narrative?

Most intriguing.