Works
Wood says that many thought Dyer to be a Rosicrucian, and that he was a firm believer in alchemy. He had a great reputation as a poet among his contemporaries, but very little of his work has survived. George Puttenham, in the Arte of English Poesie speaks of "Maister Edward Dyar, for Elegie most sweete, solemne, and of high conceit." One of the poems once universally accepted as his is "My Mynde to me a kingdome is", which Steven May considers as possibly written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
Among the poems in England's Helicon (1600), signed S.E.D., and included in Dr A.B. Grosart's collection of Dyer's works (Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library, vol. iv, 1876) is the charming pastoral "My Phillis hath the morninge sunne," but this comes from the Phillis of Thomas Lodge. Grosart also prints a prose tract entitled The Prayse of Nothing (1585). The Sixe Idillia from Theocritus, reckoned by John Payne Collier among Dyer's works, were dedicated to, not written by, him.
In 1943 Alden Brooks proposed Sir Edward Dyer as a candidate in the Shakespearean authorship question in his book Will Shakspere and the Dyer’s Hand.
Further see Ralph Sargant, "At the Court of Queen Elizabeth:The Life and Lyrics of Edward Dyer," OUP,1935, Steven May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: Their Poems and Their Contexts, University of Missouri Press, 1991.
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