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Prospero is both the protagonist of “The Masque of the Red Death,” as well as its villain. He is the protagonist in the sense that he is the text’s principal character, but he is also a villain because, by the end of the tale, Poe condemns him for his selfish and wicked deeds. Prospero is the prince of an unnamed country whose population is being decimated by a deadly disease known as the Red Death. Instead of using his exorbitant resources to help save his people, he gathers his court and takes up residence in a lavishly decorated and fortified abbey so that they can avoid contamination. He and his companions enjoy the abbey’s decadence for about six months until, in the middle of the masquerade ball, the personification of the Red Death appears and kills everyone in the estate.
Prospero, whose very name evokes the word “prosper,” is meant to symbolize that even the wealthiest and most fortunate among us cannot cheat death and decay. At the start of the story, Prospero is “happy and dauntless and sagacious” despite all of the pain and suffering in his country because he selfishly believes that he has the wealth to out-last the plague. Poe juxtaposes decadent descriptions of the abbey’s splendor with graphic descriptions of Prospero’s suffering subjects to comment on the selfish and self-serving nature of the wealthy. Through Prospero’s death at the end of the text, Poe shows his readers that death is the only true equalizer because, for all his efforts, Prospero dies just like his abandoned subjects.
