LORD HENRY HASTINGS
SIR JOHN COLEVILLE
EARL OF NORTHUMBERLAND
LADY NORTHUMBERLAND – Northumberland's wife
LADY PERCY – widow of Henry ‘Hotspur' Percy, Northumberlands's son
TRAVERS – Northumberland's servant
MORTON – messenger
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE
SERVANT
GOWER – messenger
BEADLE
TWO GROOMS
SIR JOHN FALSTAFF
FALSTAFF'S PAGE
Bardolph
PISTOL
Falstaff dominates the play just as he seems to dominate the dinner table and the brothels of Eastcheap. Usually cited as one of Shakespeare’s most enduring comic creations and only rivalled by  Hamlet  in certain moods, Falstaff has delighted the groundlings of Elizabethan theaters and  Yale professors  alike with his loquacious wit and lust for life. 
 
 Eduard von Grützner: Falstaff mit großer Weinkanne und Becher (Falstaff with big wine jar and cup), via  Wikimedia Commons. 
 It’s commonly reckoned that the character’s name was originally “Sir John Oldcastle”, referring to a Protestant martyr executed in 1417– the first quarto of the play uses this name. There is a (loosely) historical  “Fastolf”  in  1 Henry VI , from where Shakespeare seems to have lifted the name. 
 David Scott Kastan (p. 138) offers the following further analysis of the name: 
 the name probably also points at the reality behind the braggart-warrior’s boasts and his  eventual rejection : i.e. fall staff (an perhaps with some glance at ‘shake-spear’). 
 
 The Arden Shakespeare: King Henry IV,  ed. David Scott Kastan (London: Thomson Learning, 2002) 
 Harold Bloom,  Hamlet: Poem Unlimited  (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 2003)
Henry IV Part 2 Characters of the Play