The Oscar Wilde quote, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life," becomes the chicken to the egg of Kenneth Burke's theory of Dramatism. According to Burke, human interaction resembles the art of theater and quite literally, all the world is a stage.
The question, which came first? is the way to understand Burke, because really, you won't get any closer. Whether it's the idea that symbols use human beings, not the other way around, or man invented the negative to understand the binary, rather than its obvious opposite.
In a most-perfect Kenneth Burke world, the critic (Burke), would have invented Shakespeare to understand human drama, instead, the critic invented Literary Criticism to valididate the work of Shakespeare's take on the human drama.
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From the introduction to "Kenneth Burke on Shakespeare"
Shakespeare was indeed a primary motivation for Burke's theory of ‘Dramatism,' elaborated from the Renaissance’s teatrum mundi conceit: “Instead of saying, ‘Life is a drama and the world is its theater,’ and then hurrying on, we tried to ponder this metaphor long and hard” (“Five Master Terms” 52). Although Burke studies Jacques’ “All the world’s a stage” speech only once (ATH 240–41), one senses this analysis undergirding many subsequent contemplations.
At one point early in his career, before the “urgencies and abruptness of social upheaval” of the 1930s interrupted him, Burke “had decided that, ideally, for each of Shakespeare’s dramatic tactics, modern thought should try to find the corresponding critical formation” (Counter-Statement 213).
Even in the midst of the economic and political turmoil of that decade, in the midst of his trying to understand what it meant to be a committed intellectual, Burke could still imagine that if we lived in “an ideal world now, we’d all be spending our best hours trying to specify just what all is implied in the works of Shakespeare.”
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