The Masque of the Red Death Lesson Plan: Pre-Reading, Discussion Questions, and Activities

A story about the ultra rich who hole themselves up at a raging party during a deadly pandemic?  For better or worse, this story is not quite as far-fetched as we might have thought (or hoped). 

But how to get students past the over-the-top language of the text so that they can appreciate the perhaps-not-so-over-the-top elements of the story is the real challenge.  

The key is to build their confidence and understanding piece by piece.  For me, this looks like a unit on “The Masque of the Red Death” that includes scaffolded steps that follow my usual routines of bellringer freewrite, close reading questions, context, and then discussion—followed by a few compelling paired sources to extend the conversation.

Here are my 6 tips for teaching this perhaps-too-familiar tale of a privileged prince and his inevitable fate.

Start with Vocabulary.

Like many of Poe’s other works, the plot of this story is quite engaging for students; however, if they are unfamiliar with some of the key words, they’ll have a hard time understanding the more subtle nuances of the text. I suggest starting students off with the vocab list so that they are more prepared. 

I enjoy having them write quick paragraph-long stories using the words, especially when the words are as delightfully dark as the ones here.  And when students write their own tales with words like “frenzy,” “despair,” “defiance,” and “contagion,” they’re getting more than an intro to the definitions of words—they’re getting a feel for the mood and themes of the text.

Do some low-stakes writing on the big questions.

I love a quick five-minute freewrite at the start of class.  It’s a great way to get students focused and thinking about the themes of the day, and a calming routine that aids in classroom management.  What really makes this kind of writing so effective is that the stakes are low but the ideas are big. Students are not worrying about grammar, spelling, or getting the answer right, but they are exploring their own thoughts on topics like repression, beauty, and the seven deadly sins.  

Probably because I think it’s just so apt for teenagers who are still figuring out their own identity, my favorite prompt for this story is this one: “In Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, one character famously says, “All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts.” Spend a few minutes writing about the “many parts” that you play in your life. Which of those parts is the most authentic version of you? Why?” 

Give close reading questions that get students noticing and unpacking the details independently.  

I often joke that my approach to teaching is to just keep guiding students back to the text over and over again until they realize that they’re not actually reading a foreign language and that they really can parse the challenging language on their own. 

The trick is giving them something specific to work through—a carefully chosen passage whose language they can unpack, rather than a vague question like “What does the clock symbolize?”  Since this story is both very dense and fairly short, I like to direct students to specific paragraphs and when it fits, give them the actual quote I want them to understand.  

So, for example, I ask them “What is the attitude of those in the castle? Explain in your own words what it means that ‘it was folly to grieve, or to think’ (par. 2).”  Students can basically work word by word until they understand that the party-goers believe that the best strategy for dealing with the crisis of the plague is to be happy and not worry about it.

Deepen students’ understanding with an allusion activity.

I think students are often taught to point out or name allusions, but with a bit more prompting, they can really examine how they function in a text.  For “The Masque of the Red Death,” I like to have students break up into small groups and research a single allusion. The ones that I include are masque, pestilence, Victor Hugo’s Hernani, “out-Heroded Herod,”“like a thief in the night,” “Dominion,” and Prospero in The Tempest.

After students have worked through a few different questions on their assigned allusion including defining the allusion, finding the quote in the story where Poe references their topic, and considering how the allusion adds meaning to the story as a whole, they come together in a jigsaw activity to teach their classmates.  What’s especially interesting about this story is how one reference alone doesn’t change the story too much, but taken together they really add up.  When students consider the compounded effect of more than one biblical reference, for example, they start to see how the biblical language adds an ancient and revered tone to the prose, making the tale more universal and less of a simple horror story. 

Give students discussion questions that don’t have easy answers.

All the work that students have done working through the story— considering their own ideas on the big questions, learning new vocabulary, working through the details of the text, and researching allusions—finally comes together in the discussion.

To me, the mark of a great discussion question is that the longer students discuss it, the more complexity they see and the more possibilities they’re willing to consider. One of my favorites for “The Masque of the Red Death” asks whether the prince and his courtiers are punished for their mistakes or sins—and, if so, what those mistakes or sins actually are.

Another builds on the connection to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose Prospero is a magician and artist who creates a masque for his daughter and her fiancé. After the masque, he famously says, “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.” And so I get students considering what it means to say that life is a dream and how that idea relates to Poe’s story.

Explore sources that make the story’s relevance hard to miss.

When I first read this story, it seemed like a fanciful and over-the-top horror story about the super rich.  Now, when read in the context of the ultra rich quarantining from COVID on their mega yachts or debating how to force security guards to continue working for them in their post-apocalypse bunkers, “The Masque of the Red Death” is suddenly neither over the top nor unbelievable.  

So I like to include some paired sources to continue the discussion and help students think about how the story is relevant to current issues and debates.  While some of the articles are more serious, like the essay “What Happens When the Superrich Are This Selfish? (It Isn’t Pretty.)” by Guido Alfani which focuses on the historical role of the rich to contribute in times of crisis, others are more fun but equally critical. My favorite in this bunch has got to be the Grim Reaper scene from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

If you want students to do the work of figuring out Poe’s story without spending hours putting all these pieces together yourself, my complete unit on “The Masque of the Red Death” includes the vocabulary, bellringer prompts, close reading questions, allusion research, discussion questions, and paired sources described above. 

Hopefully, students leave with a little more appreciation for Poe—and a few more questions about the seemingly-unreal world in which we live.