A dramaturgical approach, both in sociology and else-where, treats everyday behavior as a theatrical performance. Although a little too familiar, it is still worth recalling the soliloquy in Shakespeare's As You Like It, in which we are instructed:

In fact, Shakespeare appears to have been so taken with the comparison between theater and life that he had a Latinate version of the first line inscribed above the entrance of The Globe Theatre (Evreinoff, in Brisett and Edgley 1990). Evreinoff also informs us that Erasmus of Rotterdam predated Shakespeare, having made much the same point about the beginning of the sixteenth century, ...