- Alternate Character Interpretation: How sympathetic is Mephistopheles? Is Faustus an Anti-Hero or a Villain Protagonist?
- Ho Yay:
- Mephistopheles attempts to dissuade Faustus from seeking redemption by telling him "[Heaven is] not half as fair as thou".
- A bit of this with Mephistopheles and Lucifer as well, what with Mephistopheles describing the ideal woman as being "as beautiful as was bright Lucifer before his fall".
- Nightmare Fuel: The description of the torments of hell and Faustus' monologue as he waits for the devils to come and take his soul at midnight.I'll burn my books! Ah, Mephistopheles —=
- Older Than They Think: Faustus claiming to be further from redemption than Satan himself isn't just a display of hubris, but it actually has some grounding in real medieval theology. In the Malleus Maleficarum, the Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer writes that even the evil of Satan himself is "small in comparison with the crimes of witches"note , because Satan only rejected God's gift of creation, whereas witches reject both God's gift of creation and Jesus's gift of dying for their sins; and unlike Satan, they do so after having already had the chance to learn some of the ways that God punishes sinners.
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