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“The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballet-dancers, there were musicians, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and security were within. Without was the ‘Red Death’.”
This moment, which occurs in the story’s opening, introduces Prospero’s enormous wealth and his staggering arrogance. It is telling that Prospero equates money with security. He has filled his would-be sanctuary with the highest forms of luxury and is confident that his exorbitant funds render him immune to the plague. However, as the story unfolds, readers can determine that Prospero’s assertion that he is “without” the Red Death is premature. Money and power have no tangible control over death and disease which, unfortunately for Prospero, he will not learn until it is too late.
“Who dares… who dares insult us with this blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him—that we may know whom we have to hang, at sunrise, from the battlements!”
Prospero delivers this line to his courtiers when he calls on them to seize the mysterious guest. It is also the only spoken dialogue in the story. Prospero’s first and final line makes a mockery of him and his inflated sense of his own power. Prospero calls on his guests to seize the masked figure but none of them do. Prospero calls for the death of the mysterious guest but it is he who dies on the next page. Through this line, Poe undermines Prospero’s authority to show that Prospero’s money and power gave him only the illusion of control.
