this article explores the relationship between the ‘tragedy’ of Pyram and Thisbé, burlesticised, by the Artisans in Le songe of a summer night and some French analogues, two of which are particularly interesting: a long youth poem by Antoine De Baif (1572-73) with Ovide’s story, and a short anonymous room, based on the moralised Ovide, which was edited (around 1535) under the title of Moralité nouuelle, recreatifue, profitable, has four personalities, certainly intended for the scene. Despite some striking connections on both sides with Le songe, they are not source texts-source but rather intertext. The narrative poem highlights Shakespeare’s change in the cultural register by equipping its medieval material with a humanistic device, with developed rhetoric ornamentation. The Morality, on the other hand, shows us in a new light the naive efforts of the amateur comedy in Shakespeare to face the theatrical challenges inherent in the life history. Thus, from two very different points of view, the French intertexts converge to suggest the parodic potential that seems to have attracted Shakespeare to this well-known history in order to insinuate, innovatively and subtle, the fragility of generic borders.