Abstract
Within his comedy As You Like It Shakespeare has his character Jacques utter the following phrase: ‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts…’ Many years later the sociologist Erving Goffman played upon this idea in his classic work: The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Goffman, 1969). This led to what would become known as the dramaturgical perspective in sociology. The essence of this perspective is that we all perform every moment of our lives in the sense of enacting conventional patterns of behaviour. We all take on many roles in many continuing ‘plays’ with many other actors.
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© 2011 Paul Beynon-Davies
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Beynon-Davies, P. (2011). Activity: Performa. In: Significance. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230295025_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230295025_10
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