The Transformation of Language and The Pardoner’s Tale

Summary: The Pardoner’s Tale is a moral story of greed and treachery, in which three young hooligans go on a quest to find Death so they can kill him. Instead of finding Death, they find a golden treasure, and their scheming over the hoard leads them to murder each other, so that their original purpose is fulfilled. Although this is a solemn tale teaching that “greed is the root of all evil,” the Pardoner is a con artist of the highest degree, a rap artist who preaches morality strictly for his own profit, merchandising and scamming his way to a fortune at the expense of his poor fans.

Baba Brinkman’s solo performance, “The Rap Canterbury Tales,” first appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in 2004. It is a re-creation of Chaucer’s fourteenth century poem, in which a group of pilgrims traveling from London to Canterbury enter into a tale-telling contest. Every element of the performance closely parallels Chaucer’s original text, but in a contemporary setting. Baba Brinkman plays Chaucer, who is both the narrator and a participant in the pilgrimage. In this case, he is a hip-hop fan who goes to a rap concert and manages to stow away on the tour bus after the show. The rappers, to his surprise, decide to stage a storytelling battle to help pass time on the road between gigs, and each of the Tales is an exact retelling of one of the pilgrim stories. As the narrator, Brinkman/Chaucer attempts to recount the exact experience of the journey word for word, transforming into the various characters to tell their tales.

Web Resources: http://aspirations.english.cam.ac.uk/converse/chaucer/audio.acds http://www.babasword.com/

This table shows a passage from the original Middle English version of "The Pardoner's Tale" by Geoffrey Chaucer, contrasted with the rap that was adapted from it. The two columns cover the same movements of the narrative, beginning with the three friends' departure from the bar ("up they start, all drunk" vs. "the three friends hit the streets") and ending with the worst of the rioters speaking the first words after the discovery of the gold. The polysyllabic rhymes have been colorized in the rap version to show the overlapping pattern of end-rhyme and internal rhyme used throughout.

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|Chaucer's Version |The Rap Version |
| | |
|And up they stirte, al dronken in this rage, | |
|And forth they goon towardes that village |...When he'd said his piece |
|Of which the taverner hadde spoke biforn. |The rest agreed, and the three friends hit the streets |
|And many a grisly ooth thanne han they sworn, |And went to seek their destiny and provoke a confrontation, |
|And cristes blessed body al torente -- |In a drunken rage hoping Death would come and face them. |
|Deeth shal be deed, if that they may hym hente! |Their intoxication made them sure of their purpose |
|Whan they han goon nat fully half a mile, |And fed the infernal furnace of their courage, |
|Right as they wolde han troden over a stile, |A kernel nourished by these three murderous wretches in denial. |
|An oold man and a povre with hem mette. |Less than a mile into their quest to put Death on trial |
|This olde man ful mekely hem grette, |They met this guy all wrapped in bandages: |
|And seyde thus, now, lordes, God yow see! |An old handicapped man with disadvantages, |
|The proudeste of thise riotoures three |And the three friends examined his bleeding flesh |
|Answerde agayn, what, carl, with sory grace! |And demanded he tell them how he was cheating death. |
|Why artow al forwrapped save thy face? |Seeming perplexed the old man responded with soft words |
|Why lyvestow so longe in so greet age? |And said, "I walk the earth like a creature God has cursed. |
|This olde man gan looke in his visage, | |
|And seyde thus -- for I ne kan nat fynde | |
|A man, though that I walked into ynde, | |

What do you notice about the rhyme scheme in these two pieces? Vocabulary?