But first let me tell of the rooms in which it was held. It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade. It was towards the close of the fifth or sixth month of his seclusion, and while the pestilence raged most furiously abroad, that the Prince Prospero entertained his thousand friends at a masked ball of the most unusual magnificence. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure.

In the meantime it was folly to grieve, or to think.

The external world could take care of itself. With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion. They resolved to leave means neither of ingress nor egress to the sudden impulses of despair or of frenzy from within. The courtiers, having entered, brought furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. This was an extensive and magnificent structure, the creation of the prince's own eccentric yet august taste. When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys. The layout of the rooms makes it impossible to see from one to the other.īut the Prince Prospero was happy and dauntless and sagacious. Prospero and his court believe they will be immune to the disease. This pestilence is an allusion to the Black Plague and possibly the smallpox epidemic of Poe’s lifetime. And the whole seizure, progress and termination of the disease, were the incidents of half an hour. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. Blood was its Avatar and its seal-the redness and the horror of blood. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. The 'Red Death' had long devastated the country. The rapid pace of the disease adds to the heightened drama of the tale. “The Masque of the Red Death” By Edgar Allan Poe (annotations and literary analysis by Mrs.

The masque of the red death story