Cephalus, Procris and Narcissus all feature in Ovid's poem Metamorphoses.

Edward's poems were published as a single volume in 1595; Cephalus and Procris in couplet form, Narcissus in a seven-line stanza. In the first poem Edwards is more particularly imitating Marlowe and in the latter Shakespeare. Various authors starting with Thomas Warton have suggested

Pyramus: Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true.

Thisbe: As Shafalus to Procrus, I to you.

:(Midsummer Night's Dream, Act v. 1)

is a reference to Edward's work, but this is generally discounted.

The author concluded each work with a long postscript; in Narcissus this includes, using aliases, references to other poets including: Amintas (Thomas Watson); Collyn (Edmund Spenser); Leander (Christopher Marlowe) and Rosamond (Samuel Daniel). Others such as Adon have not been convincingly identified, though Katherine Duncan-Jones has recently put forth the case for Adon as an allusion to Shakespeare.

Contemporaries such as William Covell and Thomas Nashe derided the work; Covell listing it, among the ‘smaller lights’ of modern poetry and the book disappeared from the record until a fragment was discovered in the Lamport Library of Sir Charles Edmund Isham in 1867. The full copy was subsequently discovered at the Cathedral Library at Peterborough. It was republished by the Roxburghe Club in 1882.