Bardolph (Shakespeare character) He is sentenced to punishment of death by hanging. In a focal point of "Henry V", King Henry, despite being friends with Bardolph in his youth, remorselessly agrees to his punishment and has him hanged. Bardolph appears in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" as one of Falstaff's associates along with Nym and Pistol again, though his role is minor. Abraham Slender accuses him and the others of getting him drunk and then robbing him after he passed out. They all deny it. Later, Bardolph is dismissed by Falstaff because of his inadequate thieving skills ("his filching was like an unskilful
Bardolph (Shakespeare character) I", the 1598 quarto, he is called "Rossill" (an archaic spelling of the name Russell) and is at one point specified as "sir Iohn Russel". This is generally taken to mean that he originally had that name in the first performances of the play, just as Falstaff too had originally been given another name: Sir John Oldcastle. Shakespeare may have changed the name when he was forced to change Oldcastle to Falstaff after complaints from the Oldcastle family. It is possible he decided to remove any suggestion that he was ridiculing the Russell family (which included William Russell, 1st Baron