SOURCE: Siegel, Paul N. “Falstaff and His Social Milieu.” In Weapons of Criticism: Marxism in America and the Literary Tradition, edited by Norman Rudich, pp. 163-72. Palo Alto, Calif.: Ramparts Press, 1976.

In the following essay, Siegel studies Falstaff's character in The Merry Wives of Windsor from a Marxist literary perspective.

The theoretical groundwork of Marxist literary criticism may be said to be most succinctly expressed in this statement of Engels: “Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything else only has a passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of the economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself.” There are interactions within and between the various intellectual systems that are put together by...