The Rap Canterbury Tales

David E. Kemp is a drama professor at Queen’s University and the
author of The Pleasures and Treasures of the United Kingdom.

Baba Brinkman is a rapper and MC whose performance piece, “The Rap Canterbury Tales,” has been widely and wildly acclaimed. This written manifestation of the piece is illustrated in a lively fashion by his brother, the stage manager of his theatre work.

Essentially, what Brinkman does is to reinterpret Geoffrey Chaucer’s brilliant stories from the 14th-century English in which they were written into a new form that is accessible to a modern audience. In choosing the hip-hop medium, Brinkman hopes to capture the same spirit as Chaucer’s original, and to redeem hip-hop in the eyes of his parent’s generation by juxtaposing it with an unassailable icon of literary culture.

The raps, which Brinkman has performed around the world, are presented in this book together with Chaucer’s original Middle English, copious notes, an excellent introduction, and a bibliography and discography. Information about Brinkman himself is sketchy, which is a pity.

The mercurial and exhilaratingly poetic Brinkman has chosen the perfect medium to deliver Chaucer’s astonishingly timeless messages to a younger generation.