Plays

When human motivations are involved, "Why?" is the most difficult question to answer, and a question which some historians do not attempt to answer. According to the play by Shakespeare, the senators were motivated by a misplaced sense of patriotism. I think it more likely that they feared for loss of their power and possibly their lives. The previous dictator Sulla had no respect for a Senatorial toga, and he ordered Roman senators killed as easily as he ordered the deaths of other men. Sulla violated Roman law by entering Rome with his army, and Caesar had done the same. After the establishment of the Roman emperors, the power of the Roman Senate was nominal at best. The paranoid Tiberius had senators executed on the flimsiest of charges, and the insane Caligula opened a brothel in which senators' wives were required to serve as prostitutes. Even the soldier-emperors like Septimius Severus and Aurelian, who administered the Empire very well, had little patience with the Senate. The Roman Senate continued to meet after the last Roman emperor was deposed in the 5th Century, but it had no power outside the city of Rome itself, until it was finally abolished by one of the Germanic dictators in the 6th Century.

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The Senate aristocrats killed Caeasr because they perceived him to be a popular leader who threatened their their priviledged interests. So therefor they thought that he was going to go against their word.

Another View:

The government of Rome had broken down when opportunistic generals relied on their soldiers and ex-soldiers to back their ambitions. Dictator Sulla tried to establish a counter-balance to the senatorial class by transferring much of its power to the equestrian class. This rebalance might have worked but when he retired after a couple of years, things reverted to usual instability, with the opportunists re-emerging, contesting for power.

Then Caesar re-established control and tried to do better than Sulla by getting declared Dictator for life. A very shortsighted policy: it was easily circumvented by the ambitious ones terminating his life.

Hamlet is understood by most performers, audiences and critics to be musing about suicide here. 'To be' equals 'to exist', ie 'to live', or 'to carry on living'. 'not to be' is then 'to die', or 'to end life'.

Initially in the soliloquy, Hamlet's considerations favour death. He presents death as an end to 'The heartache and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to', and the same as sleep.

However, he then (famously) introduces the idea of dreams to this metaphor. Following his religious concerns throughout the play, he contemplates the possibility of some unknown experience after death, a concern that makes perfect sense given that he has already been visited by the ghost of his father. He reaches the explanation that it is this 'dread of something after death' that makes people carry on living, putting up with all of the pain of life rather than deliberately risk whatever might happen after they die. (Or, at least, after they die by suicide. Hamlet has already noted in his first soliloquy that 'the Everlasting' has 'fixed his canon 'gainst self-slaughter - ie God has forbidden suicide. Suicide is regarded as sinful, as the rough burial given to Ophelia in Act V again stresses.)

Finally, Hamlet moves from reflecting that it is fear of hell that makes people put up with life to musing that it is this sort of thinking too deeply about things that stops people doing anything significant - that deep thought gets in the way of resolution. Consequently, the soliloquy becomes another opportunity for Hamlet to berate himself for having not yet avenged his father by killing Claudius.

Whilst this speech, like many in the play, addresses the issue of Hamlet's delay in taking revenge, it's not quite the case that Hamlet can't make decisions about anything. This conception of Hamlet is quite common (possibly following Olivier's influential film version in which Hamlet is described as 'a man who could not make up his mind'), but it is not an accurate description of Shakespeare's character. He decides immediately to go to see his father's ghost, for instance, and to speak to it, and even threatens to kill his friends when they try to prevent him from following it. He swiftly decides on the strategy of pretending to be mad whilst he considers his revenge, and later produces the idea of using the players to entrap Claudius within minutes of their arrival. There are plenty of examples of swift, intelligent - sometimes rash - decisive action from Hamlet.

As for the delay to his revenge, this is interpreted differently by various performers and critics. It has been argued that he cannot pursue his revenge because he is already in the grip of melancholy following his father's death and mother's remarriage; because of the depth of his religious concerns and/or a clash between Protestant and Catholic faiths; because the role of revenger is not in his nature; because he has a sort of metatheatrical sense of the path of revenge tragedy and does not want to end up in the classic 'everybody's dead' conclusion. It can also be argued that he actually delays much less than his self-criticism suggests, when the sequence of events in the play is considered carefully. For example, its worth noting that a huge section of the play (from the start of Act II to halfway through Act IV) appears to take place during a single day, during which Hamlet sets up the play within the play, uses it to gain proof of Clauidus' guilt, refrains from killing Claudius whilst hie's praying, confronts his mother and is exiled to England. The length of the section, and of Hamlet's remonstrations with himself, can sometimes give the impression that more time is passing.