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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