Bardolph and Poins
Dr. Ros Barber on the identity of Bardolph and Poins in the Henry 4 plays. 2020
In 1933, R. A. Newhall wrote of a Johan Bardolf who was the mounted man-at-arms of Sir John Fastolf, captain of Honfleur in 1428. Noting that Shakespeare had “appropriated and corrupted” Fastolf ’s name for his Falstaff, he concludes that:
“It would be an unusually strange coincide…