There is still much speculation and uncertainty about the identity of Chaucer's audience, and about the venue in which his works were ‘performed’. In Troilus and Criseyde, the narrator frequently addresses an audience envisaged as listening to the work in oral delivery:

In the famous frontispiece to a manuscript of the poem in Corpus Christi, Cambridge (MS 61), a figure is shown reciting the poem to an assembly from a lectern, but whether this represents actual practice, or is precisely an illustration of the narrator–audience relationship presented within the text, is uncertain. Certainly the Troilus, which of all Chaucer's poems has the most exhortations (even if not consistent ones) to an audience, has a particular reason for staging the semblance of a direct, oral delivery. If and where it was so delivered, however (for example, within the royal court), remain uncertain. The House of Fame's narrator also frequently represents himself as speaking directly to a listening audience; yet this poem, which also posits a narrator who is ‘bookish’ and fond of private reading (ll. 654–60), and which, as we saw above, is immersed in a literary tradition that includes Virgil, Ovid, and Dante, points up nicely the historical position of Chaucer's work at an orality–literacy confluence. There seems little doubt that Chaucer's poems would have been read aloud, perhaps by the author himself; but there are many references in his work (as in all the dream-visions) to reading, as opposed to listening – notably in the injunction in the ‘Miller's Prologue’ to those who wish to avoid bawdiness: ‘Turne over the leef and chese another tale’ (l. 3177). It is interesting to note, however, that the previous line addresses these readers as those who may not like to ‘hear’ such a tale.

Whatever our uncertainty about the contemporary modes of reception of his work, there is no doubt that Chaucer was keenly attentive to the concept of audience, and the Canterbury Tales is an assembly not only of tellers but of listeners too, and the work pays full attention to their ways of listening.