Messenger
The overweight messenger boy, played by David Nunn, appeared in three episodes of the first series, The Black Adder: – The Queen of Spain's Beard, The Archbishop and Born to Be King. The character is presented as being clumsy and unintelligent and speaks with a strong estuary English accent. Each time the Messenger appears he enters a room and announces "My Lord, news!". In The Queen of Spain's Beard, he is one of three messengers bearing news about various European nobility, announcing "Lord Wessex is dead!". King Richard's retort, "I like not this news! Bring me some other news!" is based on a line from Shakespeare's Richard III Act 4 Scene 4 in which Richard says, "There, take thou that till thou bring better news," after hearing bad news from a messenger. The Blackadder Messenger is also prone to a kind of compulsive mimicry, mirroring Prince Edmund's movements.
Read more about this topic: List Of Minor Blackadder Characters
Famous quotes containing the word messenger:
“Then shall thy meteor glances glow,
And cowering foes shall shrink beneath
Each gallant arm that strikes below
That lovely messenger of death.”
—Joseph Rodman Drake (1795–1820)
“O you singers solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what
there in the night,
By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there aroused, the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“I am no longer an artist, interested and curious. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate, will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth, and may it burn their lousy souls.”
—Paul Nash (1889–1946)