Was Doctor Faustus a good man or an evil person?

Doctor Faustus is the hero of Christopher Marlowe’s tragedy. Christopher Marlowe was one of the top dramatists of Elizabethan age and Doctor Faustus is his best drama. In this drama, we can find the hero as an interesting person who has become tired and bored from life because he has mastered every branch of knowledge. So, he became interested to know about the art of black magic and became very powerful. From the point of view of that age, he was surely a bad and an evil man. Faustus wanted to be bad by capturing black magic. What is perhaps very important here to note is that after getting knowledge he became hungry for power not for more knowledge. So, from this point of view he was not a good man.

However, if you look from the renaissance spirit then we will perhaps a very different idea. In renaissance time, there was an attempt to break up the strong hold with of catholic charge in Europe. The catholic charge was totally powerful and the clergies used to often people a lot with their power. The renaissance spirit said that people should look beyond religion and knowledge. From that point of view, Doctor Faustus was perhaps not such a bad person after all. He wanted to go beyond the limitations of human knowledge. Yes, after getting black magic he became bad and perhaps to extant some corrupt. However, at least he knew about the world. Perhaps in our time we can appreciate Doctor Faustus more than the people of Christopher Marlowe’s time. Many of the people who saw the drama perhaps thought that the Doctor Faustus was a very evil man and if you go against the will of god then you will have to suffer. However, in our age we have perhaps a different attitude towards Doctor Faustus. Of course, we can not support his badness but we can surely appreciate his thirst for knowledge.