On December 2, 1603, the King's Company was summoned from Mortlalce to give a performance before King James I at the Earl of Pembroke's house at Wilton, where the Court, kept out of London by the plague, was then resident. There is, or was, a tradition in the Pembroke family that the play performed that day was As You Like It and that Shakespeare was one of the players. The only evidence suggested was a letter, said to be, or to have been, at Wilton, which no living eye has seen. (Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare, 1922, p. 691; and Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, iii. 209.) Setting aside that tradition, there is no record of any performance of this play in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although there is evidence (see above, p. 93) that in 1600 it was already popular. It was neglected by both Killigrew and D'Avenant after the Restoration, and it had to wait till 1740 for a hearing.

Before this hearing came, Charles Johnson had made free with parts of the play in concocting his Love in a Forest. This comedy, produced at Drury Lane in January 1723 and printed in the same year, has been mentioned in the stage-history of A Midsummer-Night's Dream, since the clowns with their Pyramus' and Thisbe were brought in to entertain the banished Duke and his followers in the forest.