Why do you think Marlowe give us so much detail on Faustus’ background?

We are provided with extensive background in order that we better understand Faustus as a man.... his desires and weaknesses. The Chorus tells us that the young man is brilliant, but that brilliance has made him impatient with human learning, and now he has moved on to magic. Faustus' long soliloquy is a revealing introduction to the character. The sin of pride is an important theme of the play, as pride is arguably the mother of all other sins. No form of knowledge is satisfactory to him, and his dissatisfaction comes from pride. He does not wish to be constrained by human limits. His condemnation of medicine is telling: Faustus is not pleased by his accomplishments as a physician, though by him "whole cities have escaped the plague, / And thousand desperate maladies been cured" (1.1.21-2). Saving lives is not enough. Faustus wants supernatural power: "Yet art thou still but Faustus and a man. Coudst thou make men to live eternally, / Or being dead, raise them to life again, Then this profession were to be esteemed." Faustus is expressing a deeply sacrilegious thought. Within the Christian belief system, power over life and death belongs to God. Resurrection of the dead is for Christ, and within God's power at the end of time. Through Christ's sacrifice, death has already been conquered, and through God's grace even a sinner can be reborn. Faustus is not interested in this kind of salvation. He seeks a base, earthly mortality. He therefore is unsatisfied with being mortal, i.e., subject to the laws of nature and God.