And despite the fact that its predisposition with surfeits of black bile owed more to the Roman medicine than modern mental health, it's still very readable today.
This week, the High Holidays begin with Rosh Hashanah, with its surfeit of culinary symbols: honey for a sweet new year, a fish head for good luck, carrots because the Yiddish word for the vegetable, meren, shares a root with the word for "plenty".
Pesto is mixed into a bechamel along with a surfeit of Parmigiano-Reggiano, then layered with noodles and two kinds of cheese, mozzarella and Monterey Jack.
Veal saltimbocca was beguilingly flavored, with its surfeit of brown sage sauce mixing with prosciutto and truly too much mozzarella; the raw spinach in the dish would have been better cooked, though, and in more generous quantities, and the meat had an occasional bit of gristle.
The same holds for Stanwyck, whose movies tend to present her either with a surfeit of men, offering safety in numbers, or with a single dumb sap, whom she pursues with the violence of unspecified revenge.
Theirs is a really enjoyable free fringe show, with a surfeit of larger-than-life characters who (as with Lloyd's 2011 solo debut) only barely conceal the fun-loving performer beneath.
But an obsession with size and technological advances has saddled Chinese steel mills with a surfeit of high-end capacity and the equivalent of $400 billion in debt, leading to a drain on profits.
New York, in contrast, offers a heavy concentration of huaraches on five-inch heels; hybrid biker-and-combat boots with a surfeit of buckles and ties; and deck shoes incongruously tarted up with industrial zippers.
A frustratingly honourable young man with 'a surfeit of good manners', he marries the first girl he sleeps with and ends up with any number of ex-wives, mistresses, children, stepchildren and inlaws living in cottages and old rectories around his stately home.
Gene Wright, who wrote a book about science fiction films, said the film "attempts to blend pathos with awesome horror, but can't resist going for the gut with a surfeit of gore".
