Another good episode! (The “Read Poe!” story was adorable) A few thoughts:
I’ve always kind of assumed that Louis XVI was the model for Prospero, but that’s mostly because he was not far removed from Poe’s time. However, Henry VIII would work as a model for an older version. The interesting thing about both of them is that they were second sons. If Prospero became king because the Red Death killed his older brother instead of his father, that would go a long way to explaining why he was so freaked out and why he was so ill prepared to be king.
In the early months of the Covid pandemic, cities were overwhelmed while rural areas were largely untouched – and that’s with 21st century transportation. So, I don’t believe that the 50% number tells us much. It could easily be that 90% of the people in cities were dead.
I’m including a link that tells the story of Eyam, England, because it describes how they were able to get food even though they were in quarantine. If you don’t know the story it’s the mirror image of this story. In 1665, the Bubonic Plague came to Eyam. This villagers isolated themselves to protect the neighboring villages. Many of them died, but the plague did not spread. FWIW: I know someone who grew up about 10 miles outside of Eyam – this is not an Internet hoax. https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/652711/eyam-england-bubonic-plague-village
I don’t think we can say whether children were in the castle or not. They could have easily been in a different part of the castle being attended by wet nurses, nannies, tutors, etc. Or they could have been left at home. Modern rich people do both.
Re the number of people in the castle: I find it hard to believe that people of this class would travel without servants. At a bare minimum there would be one attendant for every man and woman, and probably more. So, 1000 revelers implies, at the very least, 3000 people, and then there are the servants of the castle, entertainers, possible children, etc. I’m thinking it is more like 4000-5000 people.
Louis Pasteur was just beginning his experiments in the 1840s. There’s no way Poe would have known about the germ theory of disease, but, as you said, it really doesn’t matter for the story. That being said, people of the time were working out how disease spread even if they didn’t understand why.
I also came to this story with a lot of the same assumptions as you both discussed. Prospero was young (and I pictured his "sagacity" more as political cleverness (Poe could even have called him "sanguine" except that would be too on-the-nose)). The revelers were all having a good time and somehow had no family ties or material dependencies that would intervene with that. The disease was airborne and probably slid in on a puff of air before the door was completely welded, etc. I also thought the whole thing was allegorical and essentially just an indictment of the rich as so poisonously self-concerned that they doom themselves by their own decadence. After listening to the show, I have to question almost all of that. For instance, it seems unlikely that anything with a long incubation period or was less than rampantly infectious would end up killing all thousand party goes within one winding of the clock. (Although I assumed originally everyone died within a half-hour of Prospero, the story says the last one died when the clock stopped, so, maybe a day, give or take.) All of that made me reconsider the "disease" itself. What if it, as ktvician hinted above, it is caused by, or at least tightly correlated with, the lifestyle of the rich and shameless? Maybe it is a toxin that happened to occur naturally on the grape skins of the finer vineyards, a poisonous metal alloyed with pewter tankards, a prion present among prize cattle, or even an STD recently imported by a traveling aristocrat. All of those could kill a large portion of a population without necessarily killing all of them, and natural distribution patterns would limit their range (Unless those most at risk happened to weld themselves into a months-long, Roman-style, Eyes-Wide-Shut debauch...) It really is a fascinating story. The "...and then all the party-people died horribly..." ending makes the whole thing feel like a morality play, but the moral of the story isn't particularly clear (or, at least, any number of morals can be conjectured and reasonably defended within the text). It's as if the overflowing detail of the setting invites countless interpretations. For instance, for the first time just now I noticed the role the word "rage" plays in the story: The pestilence "raged most furiously abroad" The prince's "brow reddened with rage"
and "maddening with rage and the shame"
forces him to chase down his own death, after which the revelers' "wild courage of despair" (co-rage?)
causes them to throw themselves into the same, deadly fate
(All of that "rage" business is probably even less meaningful than the sequence of colors of the rooms, but the fact that the story is just dripping with such symbolism and turns of phrase just underscores how deep the interpretation rabbit-hole can go.) You guys mentioned something in this episode that I had never heard before, that "The Raven" was Poe (to at least some extent) mocking poets or poetry in general by simply choosing some words, rhythm, and rhyme to show that's all required to whip up a quick masterpiece of undeniably evocative poetry. Is it possible that Poe is doing something similar within The Masque... -- cramming together all these voluptuous rooms, orchestra, colors, writhing dream-masqueraders, costumes, etc. to create an undeniably evocative setting? Did he lock all those lustrous images into the story just like the prince locked up the masqueraders? Did Poe then catalyze the mixture by inserting the bare minimum of unique elements into the setting of pluralities to turn it into a story -- add one dauntless, sagacious protagonist (no backstory, no arc, just rage and a dagger); one shrouded, blood-spattered antagonist (forget backstory or arc, no dialog, no weapon, not even any tangible form); and a countdown timeline driven by a singular, giant, literal clock?
The prevailing theory of disease at the time was "miasma", or pollution. This could be interpreted as symbolic in a way: the people are corrupt or become corrupt and thus bring the disease on themselves.
Or it could be that the some of the stored supplies spoiled after six months and provided the pollution by rotting.
This party must have been packed. Besides the 1000 partygoers and their staff (whom we might figure were not in the rooms during the party), there are entertainers and an orchestra. I've owned a house as big as one of those rooms, and I doubt I could have fit 200 - 250 people in it very comfortably.
Each of the rooms is about half a basketball court (roughly 90x50 feet, versus 60x40). Imagine 500 people standing on a basketball court. They'd fit, but it would be crowded. Each person would have a 3x3 square.
Online sources for The Masque Of The Red Death:
Illustrated PDF, with some definitions and discussion at the bottom: https://www.public.asu.edu/~cajsa/eng200_fall07/The%20Masque%20of%20the%20Red%20Death.pdf
This one has a link to an audio version:
Plain HTML, for the OGs out there:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1064/1064-h/1064-h.htm