Faustus - a brilliant sixteenth-century scholar from Wittenberg, Germany, whose ambition for knowledge, wealth, and worldly might makes him willing to pay the ultimate price, his soul to Lucifer in exchange for supernatural powers.
Mephastophilis - A devil whom Faustus summons with his initial magical experiments. Mephastophilis’s motivations are ambiguous: on the one hand, his oft-expressed goal is to catch Faustus’s soul and carry it off to hell; on the other hand, he actively attempts to dissuade Faustus from making a deal with Lucifer by warning him about the horrors of hell.
Old Man - An mysterious figure who appears in the final scene. The old man urges Faustus to repent and to ask God for mercy. He seems to have replaced the good and evil angels, who in the first scene, try to influence Faustus’s behavior.
Good Angel - A spirit that urges Faustus to repent for his pact with Lucifer and return to God. The Good Angel represents Faustus’s conscience.
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Evil Angel - A spirit that serves as the counterpart to the good angel and provides Faustus with reasons not to repent for sins against God. The evil angel represents the evil half of Faustus’s conscience.
Wagner - Faustus’s servant. Wagner uses his master’s books to learn how to summon devils and work magic.
Clown - A clown who becomes Wagner’s servant. The clown’s antics provide comic relief; he is a ridiculous character, and his absurd behavior initially contrasts with Faustus’s magnificence. As the play goes on, Faustus’s behavior comes to resemble that of the clown.
Robin - An innkeeper, who is like a clown, provides a comic contrast to Faustus. Robin and his friend Rafe learn some basic conjuring, demonstrating that even the least scholarly can possess skill in magic.
Valdes and Cornelius - Two friends of Faustus, both magicians, who teach him the art of black magic.
Horse-courser - A horse-trader who buys a horse from Faustus, which vanishes after the horse-courser rides it into the water, leading him to seek revenge.
The Scholars - Faustus’s colleagues at the University of Wittenberg. Loyal to Faustus, the scholars appear at the beginning and end of the play to express dismay at the turn Faustus’s studies have taken, to marvel at his achievements, and then to hear his agonized confession of his pact with Lucifer.
The pope - The head of the Roman Catholic Church and a powerful political figure in the Europe of Faustus’s day. The pope serves as both a source of amusement for the play’s Protestant audience and a symbol of the religious faith that Faustus has rejected.
Benvolio - A German nobleman at the emperor’s court, a knight. He is skeptical of Faustus’s power, and Faustus makes antlers sprout from his head to teach him a lesson. He seeks revenge on Faustus and plans to murder him.
Bruno - A candidate for the papacy, supported by the emperor. Bruno is captured by the pope and freed by Faustus.
Martino and Frederick - Friends of Benvolio who reluctantly join his attempt to kill Faustus.
Analysis of Major Characters
Faustus
Faustus is a contradictory character, capable of tremendous eloquence and possessing awesome ambition, yet prone to a strange, almost willful blindness and a willingness to waste powers that he has gained at great cost. When we first meet Faustus, he is just preparing to embark on his career as a magician, and while we already anticipate that things will turn out badly, there is nonetheless magnificence to Faustus as he contemplates all the marvels that his magical powers will produce. He imagines piling up wealth from the four corners of the globe, reshaping the map of Europe (both politically and physically), and gaining access to every scrap of knowledge about the universe. He is an arrogant, conceited man, but his ambitions are so grand that we cannot help being impressed, and we even feel sympathetic toward him. He represents the spirit of the Renaissance, with its rejection of the medieval, God-centered universe, and its embrace of human possibility. Faustus, at least early on in his acquisition of magic, is the personification of possibility.
But Faustus also possesses an ignorance that becomes apparent during his bargaining sessions with Mephastophilis. Having decided that a pact with the devil is the only way to fulfill his ambitions, Faustus then blinds himself happily to what such a pact actually means. Sometimes he tells himself that hell is not so bad and that one needs only “fortitude”; at other times, even while conversing with Mephastophilis, he remarks to the disbelieving demon that he does not actually believe hell exists. Meanwhile, despite his lack of concern about the prospect of eternal damnation, -Faustus is also overwhelmed with doubts from the beginning, setting a pattern for the play in which he repeatedly approaches repentance only to pull back at the last moment. Why he fails to repent is unclear: -sometimes it seems a matter of pride and continuing ambition, sometimes a conviction that God will not hear his plea. Other times, it seems that Mephastophilis simply bullies him away from repenting.
Mephastophilis
The character of Mephastophilis is one of the first in a long tradition of sympathetic literary devils. Marlowe’s Mephastophilis is particularly interesting because he has mixed damnation. Indeed, he openly admits it, telling Faustus that “when we hear one rack the name of God, Abjure the Scriptures and his savior Christ, We fly in hope to get his glorious soul” (3.47–49). It is Mephastophilis who witnesses Faustus’s pact with Lucifer, and it is he who, throughout the play, steps in whenever Faustus considers repentance to persuade or threaten him into staying loyal to hell. Yet there is an odd ambivalence in Mephastophilis. He seeks to damn Faustus, but he himself is damned and speaks freely of the horrors of hell. When Faustus carelessly declares that he does not believe in hell, Mephastophilis insists that hell is, indeed real and terrible, as Faustus comes to know soon enough. Before the pact is sealed, Mephastophilis actually warns Faustus against making the deal with Lucifer. In an odd way, one can almost sense that part of Mephastophilis does not want Faustus to make the same mistakes that he made. But, of course, Faustus does so anyway, which makes him and Mephastophilis kindred spirits. It is appropriate that these two figures dominate Marlowe’s play, for they are two overly proud spirits doomed to hell.
Source
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/doctorfaustus/canalysis.html
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