Tourney pens Shakespearean ‘memoir’
by Melinda Palacio -- September 16, 2004
It would take more than your average poet or novelist to take on the audacious task of penning Shakespeare’s memoirs. One brave writer, Goleta resident Leonard Tourney has taken up the gauntlet.
The UCSB professor has published a new book, Time’s Fool, written in Shakespeare’s voice. The first person account is both a murder mystery and a fictionalized event of Shakespeare’s life. In the last years of his life, the Bard tells a story about himself.
Although
writing a novel in Shakespeare’s voice would certainly take
some confidence, to say the least, Tourney actually approached the
task humbly. His first instinct was to write the story in third
person and allow his previous Elizabethan detectives, Matthew and
Joan Stock, to come to Shakespeare’s aid. Over the past 20
years, Tourney has written eight murder mysteries set in
Shakespeare’s time and solved by his beloved characters the
Stocks. 
But with a new publisher came a new editor, who suggested that Shakespeare tell his own story and solve his own mystery. Tourney decided to use the form of the memoir. But said it was “sad” to give up the Elizabethan power couple who’ve solved his previous murder mysteries, starting with his first published novel, The Players’ Boy is Dead, 1980.
“I didn’t have a voice of my own in first person, much less for Shakespeare in first person. And, the first utterance of that voice is the first sentence in the book: “Love is bitter and love is sweet, but more bitter than sweet, and a nearer cousin to grief than to pleasure.”
Tourney’s made up lines certainly sound like something Shakespeare would say. For this unassuming author, each sentence represents both a challenge an opportunity to veer from the correct voice and “make a mess of it, get the wrong voice so the character suddenly sounds like someone else living in a different time.”
His uncertainty about his own ability to accomplish the difficult task of reworking his novel in Shakespeare’s voice made Tourney determined to succeed. “I had always thought that writing this book was presumptuous and a losing proposition,” he said, “I went ahead and risked failure because I was so intrigued by the challenge.”
Tourney, 62, has more experience in Elizabethan speech than the average person. Writers of historical novels must walk an especially high tightrope because they must create a semblance of the language.
In creating the voice of Shakespeare and the speech of his times Tourney said he used a compromise. “You don’t want the reader to need footnotes and you don’t want the people to sound like us. And, I’ve always found it an interesting problem as a writer. If lines have a Shakespearean feeling or sound like they could be from some play, they are probably lines that I made up. Elizabethans loved language. I think readers of books of this period expect characters to be witty and more colorful in their language. Language is one of the ways a historical writer keeps the reader in the time period where the language takes place.”
For Tourney the challenge of language was more compelling than plot and storytelling. “Shakespeare expressed the views of his time in a way that few writers were able to approach. He was a poet. He was the absolute master of words.”
Tourney’s accomplishments in Time’s Fool are impressive. The historical page turner tells an intriguing story while capturing the complexity, passion and humanity of the man who was one of the creators of the English language. Moving slightly beyond what we know about William Shakespeare of Stratford to Time’s Fool, the murder mystery that might have happened, represents the most fun that Tourney’s had as a writer. He has already completed a draft of a second memoir and mystery told from the perspective of the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon.