It has been suggested that he was either son of Edward Tournor of Canons, Great Parndon (Essex), or his grandson via Captain Richard Turnor, water-bailiff and subsequently lieutenant-governor of Brill in the Netherlands.
However, the literary scholar Allardyce Nicoll concluded "the evidence connecting him with the Turnors of Great Parndon is of the slightest", further observing that he had "discovered not a shred of proof for associating him with any others of the numerous Turner families of this time.
Allardyce noted that the alleged connection of Cyril Tourneur with the Great Parndon family is not corroborated by that place's official records.
[3][4] A difficult allegorical poem called The Transformed Metamorphosis (1600) is Tourneur's earliest extant work; an elegy on the death of Prince Henry, son of James I of England, is the latest (1613).
It confidently reproduces themes and conventions which are characteristic of medieval morality plays and of Elizabethan memento mori emblems.