Often lost in our continued marveling at the words of William Shakespeare is the fact that the Bard’s plays are often shockingly violent. A handful of new British productions embrace the bloody brutality, and Ben Brantley says that it’s impossible to miss the wider significance of the interpretation. “Besides demonstrating that there’s more than one way to skin a corpse, these contrasting takes on Titus anatomize the impact of a world where slaughter and torture are everyday occurrences, and especially on those whose job is to kill… The current investigations into the alleged rape and murder of civilians by American soldiers in Iraq have made such presentations tremble with inescapable timeliness.”