His is the spirit of Renaissance scholarship heightened to a passionate excess.

The play gleams with the pride of learning and a knowledge which learning brings, and with the nemesis that comes after it.

"Oh! gentlemen! hear me with patience and tremble not at my speeches.

Though my heart pant and quiver to remember that I have been a student here these thirty years; oh! I would I had never seen Wittemburg, never read book!" And after the agonizing struggle in which Faustus's soul is torn from him to hell, learning comes in at the quiet close.
"Yet, for he was a scholar once admired, For wondrous knowledge in our German Schools; We'll give his mangled limbs due burial; And all the students, clothed in mourning black Shall wait upon his heavy funeral." Some one character is a centre of over-mastering pride and ambition in every play.

In the _Jew of Malta_ it is the hero Barabbas.