‘Mesur for Mesur,’ by ‘Shaxberd,’ is one of the plays mentioned in the Revels Accounts. The list for 1604–5 says that the play was acted at Whitehall on St Stephen's night (December 26), 1604, by His Majesty's Players (v. pp. vii, 101–3). There is no other known mention of a performance of this play before the Restoration.

On February 18, 1662, Samuel Pepys saw at ‘the Opera’ (Lincoln's Inn Fields) a play called The Law against Lovers, ‘a good play and well performed, especially the little girl's (whom I never saw act before) dancing and singing.’ The little girl was acting Viola, the younger sister of Beatrice. She sang a song: ‘Wake all the dead! what hoa! what hoa!’; with Benedick, Escalus, Beatrice and Lucio she joined in a chorus: ‘Our Ruler has got the vertigo of State,’ and she danced a saraband with ‘castanietos.’ What has all this to do with Measure for Measure? The connection is that The Law against Lovers was D'Avenant's version of Measure for Measure, with Benedick and Beatrice introduced into it from Much Ado about Nothing. ‘Though not only the characters,’ says Langbaine, ‘but the language of the whole Play almost, he borrow'd from Shakespeare; yet where the language is rough or obsolete, our Author has taken care to polish it.’ The result may be studied in D'Avenant's Works (1673).