Comment: Downton Abbey, Americans, and an English Country House online course

Dr Jim Fitzmaurice, from the University of Sheffield's School of English, invites lovers of literature to go through the virtual key hole of some of the UK's most important country houses and delve into 450 years of literature inspired by the fascinating buildings in a new online course launched on 2 June 2014. Dr Fitzmaurice explains why people across the world, especially fellow Americans, are mesmerised by Downton Abbey, Mr Darcy and all things Shakespeare. As an American and as a retired university English teacher from Arizona, I can say that my fellow countrymen and women have long been partial to the fiction, poetry, and drama of the country house. Americans also love Shakespeare. There seems to be a Shakespeare festival in every corner of the USA. One of our favourite plays is Twelfth Night, nominally set in Illyria but actually a record of life lived back and forth between two English country houses. Shakespeare paints us a picture of a spoil-sport head servant named Malvolio and his well-deserved comeuppance in a way that foreshadows the servant politics of Downton Abbey.