Dramatism

"All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

William Shakespeare

Dramatism, an interpretive communication studies theory, was developed by Kenneth Burke as a meta-method for analyzing human relationships. This theory compares life to a drama and provides the most direct route to human motives and human relations. It sets up the Five Dramatistic Pentad strategy for viewing life, not as life itself, by comparing each social unit involved in human activities as five elements of drama - act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose, to answer the empirical question of how persons explain their actions, and to find the ultimate motivations of human activities.