Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar” has always been about more than killing Julius Caesar.

On the eve of World War II, Orson Welles staged a landmark anti-Fascist production with a Mussolini-like Caesar. The Royal Shakespeare Company recently set the play in Africa, powerfully evoking the continent’s dictators and civil wars. Five years ago, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis staged a production featuring the assassination of an Obama-esque Caesar by a group of right-wing conspirators.

But it’s the Public Theater in New York that finds itself in the middle of a pitched controversy, for its new staging of the play at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Oskar Eustis, the director, chose to make his Caesar decidedly Trumpian, giving him a shock of hair, an overlong red tie and a wife with a recognizably Slovenian accent. As all Caesars are, he’s killed in the middle of the play — bloodily — by Brutus and his band of co-conspirators.

[Outrage over a Shakespearan depiction of President Trump.]

That killing has driven Delta Air Lines and Bank of America to pull all or part of their sponsorship of the Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in the Park program, and thrust the theater into a maelstrom of criticism from President Trump’s supporters.

“Julius Caesar,” with assassination at its core, is politically fraught, and subject to multiple interpretations. The play was written during a tense moment when Elizabethan England seethed with political plots. In Catherine the Great’s Russia, copies of the play were removed from bookstores. Over the years, totalitarian regimes have banned or bowdlerized it. And audiences and scholars have long debated the play’s meaning, and the extent to which Shakespeare was sympathizing with the conspirators or condemning them.