Reiss on Audience
Reiss, Edmund. “Chaucer and his Audience.” Chaucer Review 14.2 (1979): 390-401.
In his essay, “Chaucer and his Audience,” Edmund Reiss argues that Chaucer’s audience changes our perception of his writings because it affected what and how he wrote. There is little agreement among scholars about his audience or even if it really existed. Some claim that Chaucer was a court-writer in the same tradition as story-telling minstrals. Deter Mehl claims that it should not matter what Chaucer’s reality was, because his audience “’can never be more than an abstract reconstruction which does not really affect our experience when we read Chaucer’” (390). But Reiss argues that Chaucer’s poetry gives even modern readers the sense of an audience, and if it was important to Chaucer it should be investigated.
Chaucer’s poems have an essentially oral nature in which his composition depends on his audience. Chaucer has a unique ability to create a sense of rapport in the close relationship between writer and author. His knowledge of an audience may have led him to depend on the presence of one, and this is the involvement that even modern readers feel.
Occasionally, Chaucer makes readers doubt that the audience is any more real than his narrators are, especially when the narrator interjects to state the obvious. Reiss writes that “just as Chaucer creates a narrator addressing an audience, so he creates an audience being addressed by this narrator (392). Chaucer enjoys mixing the expected with the unexpected as well as the sincere with the ironic. To do this without fear of misinterpretation means that Chaucer knew his audience and understood their knowledge on his subjects. It is because of the audience’s knowledge that Chaucer can freely distort and pervert ideas in his irony and not fear being misunderstood. Chaucer takes pleasure in his play on ideals and common knowledge of medieval audiences.
Additionally, Chaucer plays with allusions to information that modern readers do not have access to. He enjoys using ambiguity to allow his audiences bring their own meaning to the work. What medieval audiences may have thought about certain passages will probably never be known. Since as a writer and entertainer Chaucer could not have allusions that only he and a few elite would understand, it has to be assumed that his audience would have all reacted the same to his ambiguities. Additionally, Reiss suggests that Chaucer does this to bring the audience into an interaction with the work. Since Chaucer and his audience were interested less in new material and more in the old, it is possible that they enjoyed the latter more because they could see the poet’s influence on the familiar, traditional work. It gave Chaucer a chance to show off and the audiences a chance to appreciate Chaucer the poet instead of a mere retelling of a well known text.
The second type of audience familiarity is based less on audience familiarity than on their ability to evaluate and judge the texts for themselves. Chaucer enjoys creating what Reiss refers to as “false dilemmas” to set up the appearance of conflict while avoiding making any meaningful statement about the subject at hand (399). Chaucer calls attention to discrepancies between the ideal and the real, and relies on his audience to recognize this. He offers an ideal—such as marriage as a solution to all problems in “The Knight’s Tale”—but later exchanges it for the opposite—marriage is the cause of all problems in “The Miller’s Tale.” Chaucer’s manipulations of his audience were masterful, and few can match his style.
Reiss’ thesis was direct and masterful. He offers differing opinions within medieval studies on the nature, existence and importance of Chaucer’s audience. After informing readers of the controversy he takes a side and makes his argument while addressing the concerns of all his critics in addition to crafting his essay. He addresses every aspect of his thesis in an organized fashion, and does not rely on overly-complicated scholarly language to do so. His insights into the court entertainments in medieval England are useful in referencing who Chaucer’s audience would be and what they may have been knowledgeable about. Reiss is excellent at placing readers in the historic context that Chaucer wrote in and how his audiences may have interpreted his work. The main flaw in Reiss’ essay is his choice to reference fellow medieval scholars as much as he did. While the references are often insightful and worthwhile, Reiss relies on them nearly as heavily as he relies on primary sources of Chaucer’s works. Additionally, Reiss’ essay was short in comparison to most other scholarly works. While it makes for easy reading, it also could have been a more persuasive essay had he lengthened it by adding more primary sources. Those primary sources that he does use are almost entirely from The Canterbury Tales. Troilus and Criseyde also receives a lot of attention, but no other work by Chaucer is referenced. If this was intentional, Reiss should have mentioned his focus in the title or the introduction.
