There are some comparisons to be made between patterns found in Elizabethan and Jacobean accounts of disaster on the high seas and patterns in fictional accounts of disaster performed in English theatres during the same period. I am not here concerned to trace the influence of voyage narratives on drama, or vice versa, although there certainly were interconnections. I approach two sets of writers as quite independent of each other. Each set confronts disaster, and creates narratives which attempt to organize and control it, without ever presuming fully to explain it.

One set, the tragic dramatists, invent their fictional disasters, or borrow them from mythology, or Italian novelle, or previous tragedies, or look for something purporting to be real in the pages of the chronicles or accounts of recent murders. The other set, the narrators of voyages, were participants in the actual happenings they write about. They are persons of the drama, and they have come home to write the story up in the shape they wish it to take. As though Edgar should sit down to give his version of the story of King Lear.

Both sets so pattern their narratives that, implicitly or explicitly, responsibility for disaster is attributed to, and apportioned between, a variety of agencies. The anger of God, for example, or the absence of God, or the interference of the devil, or the personality of the protagonists, the pressure of past events, the malice of opponents. The list of agencies, though long, is finite.