What is dealt with here, in particular, is Chaucer's response to the possibility of appropriating images, of reinterpreting visual representations or of recontextualising them politically. In Theseus' Theatre, Chaucer does not merely show us art serving political purposes, being conscripted into propagandistic uses, as it were. He goes further and investigates the question of how changing circumstances actually alter the meaning of art, how visual representations depend on contexts for their decoding, and, therefore also for their recoding, and how formal and aesthetic innovation in the field of artistic production can itself be interpreted in political terms.