Taking the cue from Mark Anthony’s speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, this talk will explore the rhetorical and theatrical structure of how political power is gained and lost in public acts and performances. In the second move, we will recall Hegel’s remarks on Caesar as a “world historical individual” in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Caesar had to be repeated, Hegel argues, in Augustus and in the series of emperors who all ruled as ‘Caesars,’ in order for the Roman world to accept and confirm the idea of the ‘rule of one.’ Does the space between Caesar and Caesar, between the original autocrat and the repetition in a series of emperors, suffice for the claim that for Hegel, just as for Shakespeare, a political theory has to account for a dimension of the theatricality of power?