Madách wrote Nápolyi Endre (Andrew of Naples) in 1841, at eighteen, and the play belongs squarely to his early dramatic apprenticeship rather than to the dialectical maturity of The Tragedy of Man. Its matter is one of the great scandals of the Angevin fourteenth century: Andrew of Hungary, younger son of King Károly Róbert’s line and grandson of Charles Martel, was married to Joanna I of Naples to secure the Hungarian claim to that throne, and on the night of 18 September 1345 was strangled at Aversa with a cord of silk and gold. Joanna’s complicity was suspected across Europe; the murder gave Hungary its pretext for the Neapolitan campaigns of Louis the Great, Andrew’s brother. The young Madách takes this history as the armature for a Romantic tragedy of court intrigue, read through the lens of his own preoccupations: the isolation of the just ruler, the corrosive machinery of a faction-ridden court, and the gulf between an idealist’s dream of governing and the world’s appetite for power.

The play is built less as argument than as a closing net. Endre arrives a believer — in friendship, in his calling to make a people happy, in the woman he has married — and the five acts strip these certainties from him one by one. Around him Madách arranges a complete cast of the corrupt: the scheming Friar Róbert, who would summon Hell in the name of the sacred cause; Ágnes of Perigord, whose maternal ambition for her son Durazzo poisons the league; Taranto, Joanna’s former lover; the parasites Philippa and Artúr. Against them stand only the faithful Hungarians — the blunt soldier Arszlán, the loyal Gillet — and two figures who carry the play’s moral weight out of all proportion to their rank: the servant Cabanis, a court informer who hates the masters he serves, and his daughter Sanchia. Cabanis is the most fully realized character here, a degraded man straining toward the dignity of being merely human; his bargain to murder the king in exchange for freedom, and its catastrophe, is the dramatic and emotional center of the work. Watch for the recurrent imagery the apprentice playwright is already drawn to — the rose dissected losing its fragrance, the royal sun that gives life from afar while consuming itself, the lion in the snare — and for the bitter epigrams on the judgment of history with which Endre goes to his death.

The text is overwhelmingly in prose dialogue, with passages of free verse rising through it where the rhetorical temperature climbs; the translation follows the source’s register, keeping the speeches’ periodic build and their argumentative weight rather than smoothing them to modern brevity. The play descends to us imperfect: between Erzsébet’s reception of her son and Gillet’s resolve in the second act, the manuscript is defective, and the editorial note recording that two leaves are lost is preserved in the text. The reader should approach the work as what it is — a gifted eighteen-year-old’s reach toward a tragic subject that the mature Madách would never return to, but in which his lifelong themes are already legible.