Mistral enumerates eight dramatic works treating the life of his heroine.  They are a tragedy in five acts and a verse by Magnon (Paris, 1656), called Jeanne Ire, reine de Naples; a tragedy in five acts and in verse by Laharpe, produced in 1781, entitled, Jeanne de Naples; an opera-comique in three acts, the book by De Leuven and Brunswick, the music by Monpon and Bordese, produced in 1840; an Italian tragedy, La Regina Griovanna, by the Marquis of Casanova, written about 1840; an Italian opera, the libretto by Ghislanzoni, who is known as the librettist of Aida, the music by Petrella (Milan, 1875); a play in verse by Brunetti, called Griovanna I di Napoli (Naples, 1881); a Hungarian play by Rakosi, Johanna es Endre, and lastly the trilogy of Walter Savage Landor, Andrea of Hungary, Griovanna of Naples, and Fra Rupert (London, 1853).  Mistral’s play is dated May, 1890.

It may be said concerning the work of Landor, which is a poem in dramatic form rather than a play, that it offers scarcely any points of resemblance with Mistral’s beyond the few essential facts in the lives of Andrea and Joanna.  Both poets take for granted the innocence of the Queen.  It is worth noting that Provence is but once referred to in the entire work of the English poet.

The introduction that precedes Mistral’s play quotes the account of the life of the Queen from the Dictionnaire of Moreri (Lyons, 1681), which we here translate.

“Giovanna, first of the name, Queen of Jerusalem, Naples, and Sicily, Duchess of Apulia and Calabria, Countess of Provence, etc., was a daughter of Charles of Sicily, Duke of Calabria, who died in 1328, before his father Robert, and of Marie of Valois, his second wife.  She was only nineteen years of age when she assumed the government of her dominions after her grandfather’s death in 1343.  She had already been married by him to his nephew, Andrea of Hungary.  This was not a happy marriage; for the inclinations of both were extremely contrary, and the prince was controlled by a Franciscan monk named Robert, and the princess by a washerwoman called Filippa Catenese.  These indiscreet advisers brought matters to extremes, so that Andrea was strangled in 1345.  The disinterested historians state ingenuously that Joanna was not guilty of this crime, although the others accuse her of it.  She married again, on the 2d of August, 1346.  Her second husband was Louis of Tarento, her cousin; and she was obliged to leave Naples to avoid the armed attack of Louis, King of Hungary, who committed acts of extreme violence in this state.  Joanna, however, quieted all these things by her prudence, and after losing this second husband, on the 25th of March, 1362, she married not long afterward a third, James of Aragon, Prince of Majorca, who, however, tarried not long with her.  So seeing herself a widow for the third time, she made a fourth match in 1376 with Otto of Brunswick,