Dramaturgy

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, when he asked rhetorically whether our lives are any more than performances in which we wear different masks. And no doubt others predate him. Among more recent playwrights, perhaps Luigi Pirendello deserves special mention for having pushed the comparisons between on-and off-stage performances about as far as they can coherently go in his Six Characters in Search of an Author.

In the social sciences, dramaturgy is strongly associated with the work of Erving Goffman, who developed the term in part as a general extension of symbolic interactionism and in part as a development of the dramatism approach pioneered by Kenneth Burke, in the 1940s. For Goffman, the application of a theatrical vocabulary to the social world was one way of exploring the symbolic interactionist framework associated with the ideas of George Herbert Mead, Herbert Blumer, and Everett Hughes, which he had encountered as a student at the University of Chicago, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. However, it is also apparent that Goffman's dramaturgy owes much to Burke's dramatist perspective, as he himself acknowledged.

Burke (1969) argued that there are five key dramatist terms: the act, scene, agent, agency (i.e., the instruments used by the agent), and purpose. He proposed that they could be combined to form a “grammar of motives.” The five terms can be combined in different ways, with different emphases and in the context of different empirical settings, thus producing myriad transformative possibilities. By using his five key dramatist terms, Burke hoped that his simple model could be used to understand a wide variety of social situations. Burke was certainly ambitious, believing (unlike Goffman) that the use of theatrical concepts might enable us to grasp the motives people had for their actions.