ABSTRACT
Orlando's love acknowledges Rosalind's beauty and power by anchoring them in the "parts" of many women, giving Rosalind multiple mothers. At once evidence of Orlando's heroic love for his brother and conquest over Rosalind, the cloth also signals Rosalind's innocence as an unspotted maiden and inability to maintain her disguise as Ganymede. It highlights Rosalind's difference from Celia and Rosalind's claim to be her honorable father's rightful daughter, a claim her cousin cannot share. The napkin both describes and separates the cousins in the same way that the Old World translates the New World, and brotherhood finally trumps sisterhood in As You Like It. The bloody napkin's history traces a path similar to the Dark Lady's story in being both connective and disruptive. The napkin's powers to enchant would also mean that Othello's stories have no weight and that his tie to his bride is unstable, produced and broken by spells.
