ABSTRACT
All his successors (gone before him) hath done’t: and all his ancestors (that come after him) may.
In the final act of The Winter's Tale, the Clown, who is the Shepherd’s son and foster-brother to the newly found Perdita, daughter to a king, remarks that he and his father are now in a “ preposterous estate” (V.ii. 148).1 The phrase is routinely glossed as simply a comic malaproprism, fitting enough for an untutored rustic to speak. What he means, goes the standard gloss, is that he and his father are now in a “ prosperous estate,” the correct phrase to describe their recent and dramatic rise from the lowly status of shepherds to the state of “ gentlemen born” (V.ii.127). “ Preposterous estate” is explained as a simple verbal error for the “prosperous estate” the Clown really means-an untutored slip of the lip, like Mistress Quickly’s many similar malapropisms or like the repeated verbal slips of the “ rude mechanicals” of A Midsummer Night's Dream. We are thus, it seems, within the familiar realm of Shakespeare’s rustic wit, and the comedy here is a laugh restricted to a single line.
