the god abandons antony

All those within the sound of my voice: RUN AND GET TICKETS TO ANTONY & CLEOPATRA at Theatre for a New Audience!! It's playing on 42nd St through May 2, and there are still TDF tix (if you're a member) up through April 27th. Best of all, if you're under 25, tix are only $10! I haven't seen Shakespeare this good in a long time - and this play is so rarely performed, it's a real treat. The acting is wonderful - they do things with the old lines that really let them breathe and speak afresh - and the director is a goddam genius. Plus he's added some magic: the God (who is also the Soothsayer) walks through the stage from time to time, and stirs the waters of a small pool in the middle with his staff. It's a tragedy, sure, but they're all so over the top that there's nothing for them but death, so I maintained my composure -- until the very end, when ol' Darko threw in an image that utterly dropped me. The Enobarbus was a joy - I loved that actor as LeBret in Kevin Kline's recent Cyrano, too - and Octavius Caesar was young, gorgeous, and properly nerveless and chilling. (deliasherman will probably blog and say something more intelligent about all this soon.)

And I'd forgotten that some of my favorite lines came from the last act: The bright day is done, and we are for the dark . . . and of course, I wish you joy o' th' worm! . . . And I'd forgotten that in IV, iii the God leaves Antony, leaves Alexandria - just as he does in the beautiful poem by Cavafy (here are a couple more translations - the best, I think, may be in the 2001 translation of all his work by Theoharis C. Theoharis, still too much in copyright to be posted here). The story supposedly came from Plutarch - and most of Shakespeare's details certainly did!

Leonard Cohen turned The God Abandons Anthony into an exquisite song called "Alexandra Leaving" - listen to it if you get the chance.

Grammar Patrol: Forbidden Fruit

What is with this forbade from? Isn't it forbade to?

I hear/see it all the time now - on NPR, in a recent (excellent) story in the NYTimes, even on Neil Gaiman's blog! It's (mis?)used most often in the past tense: "They forbade them from landing on the beach." Isn't it "They they forbade them to land..."? Move it to the imperative and it becomes clearer: surely it's "I forbid you to open that door!" - not "I forbid you from opening that door!"

Is this a language elision, a regionalism, or what?