The present paper examines the complex interplay between classical prototype and early modern practice in that most metamorphic  type of writing: satire. Variously labeled a “mode” and a “genre” by modern critics, satire as produced in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England is indebted to well known classical role models such as Juvenal, Horace and Persius; yet it also stretches across other forms of writing such as drama, and distinctions such as that between “formal” and “Menippean” satire are only partly valid when mapping the complexities of satire evinced in for example well known poets such as Donne and Jonson, but also in the vogue for satirical literature in the 1590s as represented by for example John Marston, Joseph Hall and Thomas Nashe. While these authors have often been dismissed using adjectives like “marginal”, they were widely read in their own time, and Hall even claimed (mistakenly) to be the first satirist in the English language. Thus, the myth of a satirical “beginning” in the English Renaissance opens up a broad discussion on canonicity, origin and projected future – all too neglected in the discussion of a mode of writing that has received renewed attention in the wake of recent political and medial development. Satire, in short, offers provocative ways of considering both the past of the Renaissance and the Renaissance as past.