Macbeth and a Christmas Carol

William Shakespeare's Macbeth, and Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol parallel each other on many levels. Macbeth is a play that describes the rise and fall of a ruler who believes nothing can harm him, so the lead character, cleverly called Macbeth, attains power whenever possible, not caring who he hurts or what he destroys in the process. A Christmas Carol is also about the rise and fall of a town leader, the richest man in town, Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge's hunger for wealth and power is illustrated and the reader can see how an too much ambition can plague a man until it's too late. Both Macbeth and A Christmas Carol are similiar because they show how the hunger for wealth and power can destroy lives, whether it's in Shakespeare's time, of Dickens'. We see an obvious similarity in both works of literature in the beginning. Both Macbeth and Ebenezer Scrooge receive supernatural guests. Macbeth is visited by a trio of foul witches, after a long and exhausting battle with the Norwegian army. These witches predict that Macbeth will become king of Scotland and Banquo, Macbeth's partner, shall beget a line of Scottish kings. These prophesies are important to the plot and how it progresses, just like the ghosts are imperative to the story of Ebenezer Scrooge. In his case, Scrooge was visited by three ghosts of Christmas. The Ghost of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet To Come. These ghosts show Scrooge his happiness as a child, his present situation of unstability with family, and Bob Crachit's fate, and his future yet to come, death. These predictions also played an important role in the book, for Scrooge changed his ways in the end. The way the characters believed in the supernatural predictions also parallels one another. Macbeth kills the king of Scotland, after his wife's nagging, because he believed he would be come king. King Duncan's heirs fled to England, and the witches were right, Macbeth became king. If he hadn't believed in