Summary
Annabella delivers a private confession on her balcony while the Friar listens. He is moved by her feelings of remorse and agrees to deliver a letter to Giovanni from Annabella.
Vasquez tells Soranzo about Annabella's secret and Soranzo plans to exact his revenge at his birthday feast.
The Friar delivers the letter to Giovanni. The letter is written in Annabella's blood, and tells Giovanni that they have been discovered. Vasquez arrives to invite Giovanni to Soranzo's birthday party, and after accepting, Giovanni tells the Friar that he will get revenge on Soranzo at the party.
At Soranzo's house, he and Vasquez prepare for the feast, where the bandits will be waiting to kill Giovanni. When Giovanni arrives, Soranzo tells him to go visit Annabella in her bedchamber while she gets ready for the feast. Vasquez thinks that Giovanni should be murdered in the midst of having sex with his sister.
In Annabella's bedchamber, the brother and sister lament their current situation and hope that some time in the future, their incestuous relationship will not be looked at with such disdain. Giovanni asks for one final kiss from his sister. While kissing her, he stabs her in the heart with a dagger, explaining how he has saved her reputation and prevented Soranzo's assault on her.
Giovanni arrives at the birthday feast and tells Soranzo that the heart on his dagger is Annabella's. He confesses their relationship in front of everyone. Florio immediately dies from shock. Giovanni stabs Soranzo, and Vasquez attempts to kill Giovanni but only wounds him. Vasquez orders the bandits to finish the job, and they kill Giovanni.
The Cardinal banishes Vasquez and orders that Puttana be burned to death for her complicity in the incest. He then demands that all the jewels be removed from the bodies and given to the Pope. He reflects on the bizarre and gruesome scene catalyzed by the incestuous relationship, asking the audience, "Who could not say, ’Tis pity she’s a whore?'"
Analysis
The end of the play centralizes the major theme of sex and death. Vasquez encourages Soranzo to let Giovanni visit Annabella's bedchamber one last time, arguing that Giovanni should be slain while committing the very sin that has led to his demise.
This connection between sex and death was not unprecedented on the early modern stage or in early modern culture. Indeed, most early modern people would have been familiar with the euphemism "little death," which signified an orgasm.
In a play that is constantly questioning the relationship between individual passions and civic duty, sex and death become emblems of two equal passions: lust and bloodlust. At the same time that Giovanni and Annabella begin their illicit affair, other characters start developing plans to kill those who have wronged them. The play therefore suggests that Giovanni's submission to his lustful desire is little different from other characters' commitment to vengeance – both are passions that overwhelm the senses and have the destructive capability of blinding one from their societal responsibility.
The sex/death dynamic becomes quite literal when Giovanni stabs Annabella in the heart during a passionate kiss. The murder, which Giovanni sees as an act of protection toward his sister, is also framed as a perverted consummation of their union. Fulfilling the promise that they will love each other or kill each other, Giovanni does both at once, the blade of his dagger becoming a metaphorical representation of the penis during the sexual act.
Scholars have long puzzled over the play's following scene, in which Giovanni appears at Soranzo's birthday feast with the heart of his sister still impaled on his dagger. Giovanni's public display of murder is also, it turns out, a public confession of his transgressions; Annabella's heart on the dagger represents the truth that has been for the most part concealed during the majority of the play. Once this truth is exposed, however, nothing but destruction ensues, confirming the Friar's prediction in Act One, Scene One that Giovanni's pursuit of his sister would lead only to death.
