【正确答案】正确答案：The play is famous both for its thematic and formal features. Thematically, the image of Faustus is historically significant as a " photo" record of the new man, the modern man, the Renaissance humanist, who steps into modern light with all the glitter of reformation and renaissance. Faustus, the medieval man, has already had everything including knowledge and power to make him happy, but he is not happy. Insatiability is his name. He sees the world as one of infinite power and profit. He wants to be a superman and a virtual god figure, and he becomes one though he has to pay an exorbitant price. Thus Faustus represents the archetypal Renaissance humanist of the 16th century and a supreme specimen of everyman for all time. This play marks a new phase in human epistemology, the one in which man emerges from his initial total submission to external forces and awakens to his own importance and power and begins to assert himself. As he is human, his potential is circumscribed and he often ends up overreaching himself, but the striving endows his life with meaning and purpose and makes it worth living.