I am Kyle's self-indulgence

The Telegraph has a news story about a play currently running in London that is so shockingly and gruesomely violent that they have a problem with patrons fainting during the performance.

The play? Titus Andronicus. The playwright? William Shakespeare.

I have never seen the play or the movie with Anthony Hopkins, but I read the play a few months ago, and that was enough for me. It's definitely not one of Shakespeare's better plays; in fact, some aspects of the story are downright awful (some scholars claim that Shakespeare was really only responsible for part of the play). It is, however, the most twisted and disgusting work of fiction I have ever come across (and people have accused me of liking some pretty twisted movies).

I think it's amazing that in a time when sadistic torture and dismemberment are the stuff of Hollywood movies, a 400-year-old play can still elicit a physical reaction in people. As I've mentioned before, people today have a distorted view of the past. We look at the prudishness of Victorian-era fiction and attribute that to all literature from the past. When I look at Titus Andronicus and The Canterbury Tales, which were very popular in their own time, I think that the opposite may be true: certain audiences in the past had a taste for blood and gore and sex that we are now just catching up to.

By the way, the article in The Telegraph describes just one of the more visually shocking scenes of the play. I think the most gruesome and twisted moment comes later, at the play's climax. If you're one of those people that likes this kind of thing, you don't want to miss it.