Brutus's Reasons: Julius Caesar and the Mystery of Motive

This essay examines the interrelation of cause, reason and motive as it is explored in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The frequency with which the words cause and reason recur in connection with Brutus, and the complexity of the manner in which the various meanings of the words are played off against one another, suggest that the thematic interest in the problem of defining human motivation is central to the concerns of the play as a whole and to the understanding of this character in particular. What is remarkable is that while Brutus insistently invokes reasons for his decision to kill Caesar he never actually gets around to specifying them in unequivocal terms, so that the audience is left frustrated in its desire to understand what it is that impels him. What Shakespeare would appear to be doing then is deliberately problematizing the issue of human motivation, tantalizingly holding out the prospect of explanatory closure without actually supplying it, so that what we are left with is a sense of the ultimate indecipherability of human conduct.