ABSTRACT
Shakespeare gave the Canadian sociologist Erving Goff man one of the most pow-erful sociological concepts: All the world’s a stage, and we are actors playing our parts. We are in eff ect reading from scripts, and frequently improvising when we forget our lines. Th is insight is developed in Goff man’s (1959) book Th e Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which remains one of the classic texts of symbolic interactionism.
