By describing the disease as mysterious and fatal, Poe increases the intensity of the horror of the disease that afflicts many. ‘Red’ death is also descriptive of the profuse bleeding that this disease in the story denotes. It also brings in allusions to deaths that marked plagues and other epidemics that ravaged the world many times.

Poe named his fictional disease ‘Red’ death, possibly to differentiate it from ‘Black’ death, another name by which the plague that wreaked havoc in the fourteenth century was known. This is an all too familiar scenario in COVID-19 times.

This story depicts the failures of authority figures to properly, adequately, and humanely respond to disease and disaster that afflict people. I refer to these iconic texts to foreground my reading of a short story by Edgar Allen Poe – The Masque of the Red Death (1842). The stories offer the listeners and readers ways in which their lives have changed due to the epidemic. In The Decameron (1353) by Giovanni Boccaccio, set during the Black Death, ten people in isolation in a villa outside Florence take turns to tell stories of morality, love, sexual politics, trade and power. Homer’s Iliad begins with a plague sent upon the Greek camp at Troy by Apollo to punish the Greeks for Agamemnon’s enslavement of Chryseis. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War too has references to the plague that wreak havoc in the lives of the people. This is not the only text from classical literature that deals with such an epidemic. The resonance with our times, as we live through a pandemic that is affecting us in so many different ways, is constantly with me as I teach the text.

This year as I have been reading the play and discussing various aspects of it, what strikes me most is the reference to an epidemic that is wreaking havoc in the lives of the citizens of Thebes. Plague figures importantly in the text and is the reason why things move in the direction that they do leading on to the tragedy of Oedipus. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is a text that I have been teaching for some years now.

The masque of the red death read