Nobody, young or old, rich or poor, can escape the clutches of plague (or tuberculosis). The fact that Prince Prospero and his wealthy entourage all believe they can avoid the Red Death – that they can, indeed, cheat death itself – is obviously naive hubris (although they were very far from being wealthy, it’s worth bearing in mind that when Poe wrote ‘The Mask of the Red Death’ in 1842, his wife Virginia had recently been diagnosed with tuberculosis – another then incurable disease involving blood, specifically when victims coughed up blood).
(A masque doesn’t have to involve wearing masks: it was a private ball popular in Italy for many centuries. Interestingly, Poe originally titled the story ‘The Mask of the Red Death’, which places the emphasis on the masked figure who shows up at the end in replacing ‘Mask’ with ‘Masque’, Poe shifts the focus onto the masquerade which Prospero stages for his courtiers. All that’s changed in Poe’s basic setup is the colour of the plague, to the fictional ‘Red Death’.
Now, it’s time for some words of analysis concerning this intriguing story which, like many of Poe’s best stories, seems to work on several levels.įirst, there is the literary precedent for the basis of Poe’s story: the Italian writer Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century work The Decameron is about a group of noblemen and noblewomen who retreat to an abbey to flee the plague, or Black Death. On Tuesday, we put together a brief plot summary of ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, Edgar Allan Poe’s short but terrifying story about a prince who retreats to his castellated abbey with a thousand of his courtiers, to avoid the horrific and fast-acting plague known as the ‘Red Death’.
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