Who are the main characters in "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allan Poe?

There are
really only two main characters in s short story . The first is Prince
Prospero, the storys , if that word can apply to a character completely lacking a moral compass.
Poes story takes place during one of the smallpox epidemics that ravaged Europe due the Middle
Ages, and the autocratic prince disappears with 1,000 of his friends and assorted sycophants
into the security of his castle. As Poes unseen narrator observes in describing the merriment
within the castle walls, its occupants oblivious to the suffering and death that is occurring
outside those walls, All of these and security were within. Without was the €˜Red
Death. 

Poes narrator wastes no time introducing the reader to the bleak
environment in which this lands population resides, describing the pestilence in the bleakest
of terms. The plagues that devastated Europe condemned millions to the most horrific of deaths.
Within Prosperos fortress, however, all was good. As Poe writes, the Prince Prospero was happy
and dauntless and sagacious. As the princes partying and jocularity continues, however, a
mysterious figure is observed. Prospero has created anof unrelenting debauchery, but he has
failed, the reader will discover, to prevent the penetration into his domain of the plague to
which those beyond his castle walls are succumbing. As the clock strikes midnight, some of the
revelers become aware of the second of Poes main characters: a masked figure which had
arrested the attention of no single individual before, and who exudes a sense of threatening
menace, a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprisethen, finally, of terror,
of horror.

This second main character, then, is the Red Death, the disease
itself. Poe describes this figure as follows:

The figure
was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask
which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse
. . .

The Masque of the Red Death,
then, involves a fateful confrontation between the prince and theof a horrific death. All other
characters, the revelers, the musicians, the fools, all serve a peripheral function in Poes
story; they exist to emphasize the princes morally-degraded temperament. They are not, however,
central to the story; only the prince and the Red Death serve that essential
function.