Chapter 4 is oriented around a letter-making signet ring whose imprint makes Curculio’s forged text “real.” Its agency, however, is not confined to epistolary deception, and this chapter unpacks the anulus’ potent theatrical agency by elucidating its operation in excess of human design. I shift my focus in exploring the metatheatrical portrait generated by Curculio’s epistolary motif. Whereas Chapters 1 through 3 consider the common ability of letters and scripts to evoke absent people, here I look at the power of these media to conjure up faraway places. Both epistles and dramatic texts bring “here” to “there” (or vice versa), a capacity enacted in Curculio’s composition of a letter at Epidaurus which encapsulates his encounter in Caria and flaunted in the choragus’ tour that blurs the line between theatrical and experiential space. Finally, this chapter returns to questions of innovation and artistic dependence. Curculio’s missive invites us to reflect on the impossibility of originality for the author on the outside when an author on the inside makes the play by recomposing yet another author’s text. A coda considers the play’s seal as related to the literary sphragis.

Marginalia in Brecht’s own copies of Unter dem Banner des Marxismus create a picture of his studies, between 1927 and 1934, in response to Lenin's call, issued in 1922, for a study of Hegelian dialectics "from a materialist standpoint." Taken together with their marginalia and the primary sources they cite, the articles by W. Adoratski, A. Deborin, and Wilhelm Reich published between 1925 and 1930 characterize the environment in which Brecht developed his understanding of dialectics and his aesthetics of epic theater.The intellectual underpinnings of this aesthetics, this chapter suggests, entail at least three concepts that are useful for epic theater’s anti-illusionist purposes: cause and effect (and its reversal) in history, including theater history; the relation of art (a material product of the “thinking brain”) to reality ("Art follows [reflects, contradicts] reality" – Brecht); and the dynamic in untenable antagonisms that, once recognized, portends their resolution (class struggle). Following Brecht’s close reading of these distinctions may help clarify the place in Brecht's theater of “militant materialism” and Lenin’s reflection theory of knowledge.