I begin this essay with Annabella's murder in ‘Tis Pity She's a Whore to focus on the end result of her incestuous actions with her brother and his ‘revenge’ as a means to explore the logic of sexual revenge cast in a courtly love scenario. The tragic costs to both of the main characters is great. Lesel Dawson recently has pointed out that inside the ideology of courtly love ‘Giovanni's murder of Annabella is a form of psychological suicide; as well as losing his beloved mistress, he has lost his beloved self’. Similarly, Annabella loses her heart and her life. Why does Giovanni become the revenger instead of the wronged husband, Soranzo? How does Annabella's characterisation function within the courtly love strictures to facilitate both her and her brother's tragic end? What happens to her actual body, her seemingly abject physicality?

While Annabella's last words, ‘Brother unkind, unkind’, are an analytic touchstone for directors and critics of the play, her body's physical response to his attack is not much remarked on. We can imagine her repeated ‘ohs’ and ‘mercy; great heaven’ as heightened emotional outbursts natural to a body in pain, but few performances show her resisting her murder, even fighting for her life, choosing instead to emphasise the eroticised – I will argue abject and masochistic – violence inherent in being ‘killed with a kiss’, a component of courtly love's script. For a vivid example, in a 2006 production of ‘Tis Pity by Shenandoah Shakespeare at the Blackfriars Playhouse, Giovanni ‘hid his poinard behind his back, lying on top of his kneeling sister as if to kiss her, but instead thrusting his knife between her legs, simultaneously killing her and her unborn child’.