1Notions of quantity, and the measurement of quantity, are integral to the plot and imagery of The Merchant of Venice. At one extreme various words are used for excess : ‘superfluity’, ‘surfeit’ and ‘excess’. In the medium range are ‘sufficiency’, ‘competency’ and ‘enough’. At the other extreme, that of deficiency, is ‘empty’. As these examples show, almost all the attention is focussed on, first of all, characterising excess and secondly on discriminating between excess and sufficiency – that is, superfluity and competency. The significance of measuring excess is most clearly felt in the judgement scene, the climax of the play, which turns on Portia’s judgement to Shylock : ‘Thou shalt have justice more than thou desir’st’ (IV. i. 312)1. This is the moment when ‘excess’, which has previously operated in the play as a synonym for ‘usury’, is reconfigured in a legal context, to indicate that Shylock will be subject to an ‘excess’ of justice. This ‘excess’ of justice has received a mixed critical reception : it can be read as a legal quibbling, even an act of duplicity on Portia’s part, as she deludes Shylock into thinking that he has a just case, and then invokes more justice than actually pertains to the case. Measurement becomes in this scene synonymous with justice as Shylock is instructed to cut a ‘just pound’ :

Portia : Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh, –
Shed thou no blood, nor cut thou less nor more
But just a pound of flesh : if thou tak’st more
Or less than a just pound, be it but so much
As makes it light or heavy in the substance,
Or the division of the twentieth part
Of one poor scruple, nay if the scale do turn
But in the estimation of a hair,
Thou diest, and all thy goods are confiscate. (IV. i. 320-328)

2Precision in measurement is key to the operation of Portia’s justice, and at this moment it contrasts powerfully with the preceding discussion of mercy, which operates not in terms of ‘just’ measurement, but of generosity and excess : ‘Be merciful’, says Portia, ‘take thrice thy money’ (IV. i. 230-231). Bassanio couches his pleas to Shylock in extravagant terms – offering twice, thrice and ten times the amount of the bond, and offering to forfeit ‘my hands, my head, my heart’ (IV. i. 208). the parallelism here expresses the measureless scope of Bassanio’s proffered bargain, and implies ‘all of me’rather than a mere part, as the original bond maintained. However, the excessive offers of Bassanio, and the invocations of measureless mercy, are doomed to failure, for Shylock’s character is formed at the very opposite end of a scale of mercy : he is ‘void, and empty/From any dram of mercy’ (IV. i. 5-6). Mercy is in its essence an act of generosity and excess : it is not exercised in the terms even of sufficiency, so Shylock’s deficiency is morally disabling.

3There are three arenas of action in which measurements and quantities are of profound significance. Firstly, there is the usury plot : Shylock’s graspingness is contrasted throughout with the moderation of Antonio ; indeed Antonio is remarked by Shylock to be content sometimes only to take back again the same amount he lent : in this he is an example of competency and sufficiency. ‘Excess’, as I remarked earlier, is synonymous with ‘usury’ in this plot, and it is the word used when Antonio seeks to differentiate his methods from those of Shylock :

Antonio : Shylock, albeit I neither lend nor borrow
By taking nor by giving of excess,
Yet to supply the ripe wants of my friend,
I’ll break a custom… (I. iii. 56-59)

4The tract A General Discourse against the damnable sect of Usurers (1578) supports this synonymity (sig. D1v) : ‘Usurie, or as the woorde of God doeth call it, excesse…’ The second context in which measurement is significant is that of justice : Portia trumps Shylock’s dependence on the precise terms of the bond, in order to require a ‘just’ pound and to show subsequently that justice, like mercy, can in fact exist in superfluous forms. Hence the characteristic of usury – excess – is thereby turned against the usurer himself. The third arena of action involves Shylock’s moral deficiency of mercy : deficiency is of course the third element of the traditional moral grouping of excess, moderation, and deficiency. The source for this grouping is Aristotle’s Ethics, in which the ‘golden mean’ is praised. Christian ethics also lauded the ideal of the mean, especially in the context of worldly wealth : the biblical scholar Joseph Mede, commenting upon Proverbs 30 : 8, 9, remarks that ‘a Competency, or the Middle estate between Want and Superfluity, is in choice to be preferred, as the best and happiest condition2’.

5In the realm of measurement – rather than ethics – these ideas are grouped into a pair rather than a threesome : excess, or superfluity, here stands against ‘competency’, or sufficiency. Superfluity and competency are forms of measurement and assessment that can extend their reach beyond the financial, legal or moral frameworks listed above. When such notions as love, friendship, or good fortune are addressed in terms of superfluity and competency – when their measurement is attempted – then the two plots of the play are linked. The legal drama of the Shylock/Antonio plot and the amorous drama of the casket plot are therefore seen to shadow one another and to be closely interwoven.

6The play’s first mention of this superfluity/competency dichotomy in fact occurs at the beginning of the casket plot. Portia complains that she is ‘aweary of this great world’, and Nerissa replies :

Nerissa : You would be (sweet madam), if your miseries were in the same abundance as your good fortunes are : and yet for aught I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing ; it is no mean happiness therefore to be seated in the mean, – superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer. (I. ii. 3-8)

7The proverbial character of this observation is noted by Portia : she remarks that these are ‘good sentences’, that is, sententiae, which emphasises the moral dimension of the relationship between superfluity and competency – or, to use the moral terms, ‘excess’ and ‘mean’. The import of Nerissa’s comment is that surfeiting brings sickness and aging, whereas holding to the mean leads to long life. There is no specific development of this theme in the casket plot, or of the accusation that Portia suffers from an abundance of good fortune. Rather, the implications of this ‘sentence’ are worked out in the usury plot, as surfeit (that is, the excess entailed in usury) leads very directly to Shylock’s suffering. A similar proverbial wisdom links the casket and usury plots through the intervention of Launcelot Gobbo, the clown who binds the two plots by being transferred from Shylock’s employment into that of Bassanio. He remarks to Bassanio :

Launcelot : The old proverb is very well parted between my master Shylock and you sir, you have ‘The grace of God’sir, and he hath ‘enough’. (II. ii. 142-144)

8The proverb at debate here is ‘The grace of God is gear enough’ (with a reference to 2 Corinthians 12 : 9). It refers to the fact that Shylock is ‘a rich Jew’ (140) and so has ‘enough’ in worldly terms (and hence should not desire more through usury), whereas Bassanio is ‘so poor a gentleman’ yet has ‘enough’, since he is a Christian and blessed with God’s grace. Thus the opposition between superfluity and competency is here made synonymous with the main binary opposition of the play, that between Jew and Christian. The Jew has ‘enough’money but wants more (rather than grace) whereas the Christian lacks money but has the sufficient grace of God.

9The idea of sufficiency also features in a quasi-proverbial capacity in the casket plot : the silver casket bears the motto “Who chooseth me, shall get as much as he deserves” (II. vii. 7), which causes Morocco to pause and ponder to himself that ‘Thou dost deserve enough, and yet enough/May not extend so far as to the lady’ (II. vii. 27-28).

10So the casket plot opens with the dichotomy of superfluity and competency, a theme which binds the two plots of the play, and unites the themes of usury, law, justice and mercy, Christianity and Judaism, value, and discrimination. These ‘sentences’ of Nerissa raise the question of how one measures abstracts such as good fortune, and the related subjects of love and friendship are similarly brought under discussion later on in the play.

11In Act III, scene ii, Portia is shaken by a storm of passions as Bassanio makes his choice of caskets, and she pleads in an aside :

Portia : O love be moderate, allay thy extasy,
In measure rain thy joy, scant this excess !
I feel too much thy blessing, make it less
For fear I surfeit. (III. ii. 111-114)

12(‘Scant’here means ‘withhold’). ‘Moderate’love is the ideal of the casket plot : deficiency in love is of course to be condemned, and ‘liberality’ in love is licentiousness. Hence Portia jestingly threatens Bassanio, ‘I will become as liberal as you’– meaning she will grant her sexual favours to the supposed doctor of law, Balthazar, just as Bassanio gave him her ring. The ring plot – in which Portia, dressed as Balthazar, demands the ring of Bassanio that she herself gave him – is itself an exercise in moderation, or keeping the mean. In deciding whether to give the ring, Bassanio must weigh the combined force of Antonio’s love and Balthazar’s ‘deserving’ against his wife’s commandment. The comedy of course is that he is in fact weighing like against like, since Balthazar is his wife, so the danger this presents to the maintenance of the mean is overcome when Portia reveals that she was Balthazar. It is, however, only partially overcome since even when Balthazar is removed from one side of the equation, Antonio’s love remains : perhaps the point here is that keeping the mean between the love of a friend and love of a wife is more difficult than it seems. Amongst friends, too, the maintenance of the mean is of great importance. Act III, scene iv opens part way through a discussion of love and friendship between Portia and Lorenzo : he praises her understanding of amity, and she shows her awareness of the Ciceronian notion – expressed in De Amicitia – that friends are mirrors to one another. Friends ‘Whose souls do bear an egall yoke of love’ possess ‘a like proportion/Of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit’ (III. iv. 13-15), so, she concludes, Antonio must be like Bassanio. Such ideal friendship is perfectly balanced, falling victim neither to deficiency nor to excess.

13I have in this paper sketched out the importance of superfluity and competency in the Merchant of Venice, and remarked the way in which these notions of quantity bind the two plots of the play, the casket plot and the Shylock plot. At a material level, superfluity is linked with usury, which is transformed by Portia into a scathing excess of justice. On the moral-philosophical plane, superfluity is to be distrusted, because it imperils the golden mean which should govern the relationships of commerce, friendship and love. The ideal is a ‘competent’ life, which is not excessive in its material demands, does not fall victim to ‘surfeits’, espouses a moderate love, and maintains a balance between the competing demands of friendship and of love.