Jean Mairet

• Born: May 10, 1604 (baptized)
• Birthplace: Besançon, France
• Died: January 31, 1686
• Place of death: Besançon, France

Other Literary Forms

Jean Mairet published two slim collections of lyric poetry, much of it occasional verse, as addenda to the first editions of Sylvie and La Silvanire. A handful of poems composed in later years, left in manuscript, were published by his biographer Gaston Bizos. Mairet’s prose writings, apart from a few surviving letters and diplomatic correspondence, consist of a treatise on poetic theory, published as the preface to La Silvanire, and several polemical pamphlets directed against Pierre Corneille. Mairet is remembered chiefly for his plays.

Achievements

It is unfortunate that Jean Mairet has been traditionally remembered mainly for his role in the quarrel over Corneille ’s Le Cid (pr., pb. 1637; The Cid, 1637). In fact, he was one of the pivotal figures in the development of French classical drama and was among the most influential champions of what would become known as the three unities (those of time, place, and action). Revived interest in the Baroque stage has prompted a reevaluation of Mairet as a gifted representative of the preclassical sensibility who was unaware of the extent to which the new critical doctrine of classicism would conflict with that sensibility and ultimately banish his works from the Parisian stage. Mairet also deserves much of the credit for notable advances in the refinement of style, sophistication of characterization, and tightness of plot construction that occurred in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Although he did not possess the genius of Corneille, Mairet had genuine dramatic talent. After more than three centuries, the best of his plays can still be read with pleasure and could conceivably be revived.

Despite his crucial role in the evolution of French classical doctrine, Mairet’s exposition of theoretical issues is disappointing. His prefaces and polemics tend to be rambling and confused, with too much pedantic accumulation of sources and technical terms and too little original thought. A careful reading of these documents, however, reveals a number of innovations that would have a decisive impact. In the preface to La Silvanire, Mairet predicates the need for the unities, not on a slavish respect for Aristotle (whose work he probably never knew firsthand), but rather on the basis principle of verisimilitude. This last is justified in its turn as a prerequisite for aesthetic satisfaction. Because the principal aim of drama is the pleasure of the imagination, the play must conform to what the spectator can accept as believable. Mairet is careful to point out that an irregular play is not necessarily a bad one. What he does claim is that the rules are indispensable if one wishes to achieve perfection and equal the masterpieces of the past. By grounding the rules in pragmatic considerations, he helped move the debate away from the obsession with antiquity that had characterized early French poetic theory, and he undeniably hastened the acceptance of these rules among both playwrights and public. In the process, he anticipated the dictum espoused by (among others) Corneille, Jean Racine, and Molière: The primary rule is to please, and all further rules are derivable from it.

Another notable innovation was the principle known today as poetic justice, which Mairet helped introduce into French critical theory. Although he was mistaken in citing Aristotle as the inventor and champion of the “double ending” (that is, the good characters are rewarded and the villains are punished), Mairet, writing at a time when defenders of the stage were earnestly trying to demonstrate its high moral purpose, laid the groundwork for the adoption of this principle, albeit in a less rigorous form. Moreover, he appears to use poetic justice as a criterion to distinguish between the genres of tragedy and tragicomedy. The intermediate genre, featuring a clear polarization between good and evil characters, achieves its happy ending by the ultimate intervention of providential forces. Tragedy, on the other hand, shows the misfortunes of sympathetic characters, punished more harshly than they deserve, in order to instruct the audience to bear the vicissitudes of life with courage and resignation. This theory, pieced together from statements scattered throughout Mairet’s prefaces and polemics, is a basically accurate reflection of dramatic practice in Mairet’s time and is all the more remarkable in that French theorists showed little interest in discussing the intermediate genre.

Biography

Jean Mairet was descended from a staunchly Catholic family that had emigrated from Westphalia to Besançon during the Reformation. Baptized on May 10, 1604, he lost both parents at an early age. He began his studies in Besançon, later transferring, following an outbreak of the plague, to the Collège des Grassins in Paris. The plague, this time in Paris, interrupted his studies once again. At this point, Mairet seems to have gone to Fontainebleau to make contacts at court. He quickly won the favor of the duke of Montmorency, an enlightened patron of the arts, who invited him to his château. There Mairet met another of the duke’s protégés, the poet Théophile de Viau, who became his friend and literary mentor. Although Théophile spent most of his final years in prison, Mairet never disguised his admiration for the older poet and even edited a portion of his correspondence. In 1625, Mairet volunteered to join his patron in an expedition against the Protestants of La Rochelle and distinguished himself in two battles. When, upon the capture of the islands of Ré and Oléron, the campaign came to a speedy halt, the duke appointed Mairet his secretary and granted him a pension of fifteen hundred pounds.

It is not clear when Mairet began to write for the stage. In the dedicatory epistle to Les Galanteries du duc d’Ossonne, he claims to have written his first play at the age of sixteen, when barely out of school, and he gives dates for the composition of his other plays, as well. Because he deliberately misled the public about his age, however, claiming to have been born in 1610 (a statement generally accepted until later biographers located and published his baptismal certificate), his chronology must be viewed with suspicion. While trying to appear as more of a child prodigy than he really was, Mairet must have realized that readers of the dedication would remember the dates of the plays’ premieres and the intervals between them. It is thus likely that the chronology he presents is accurate, provided that one adds six years to each of his figures. The resulting dates are closer to conformity with the dates of publication of the plays, for, except in the case of Chryséide et Arimand, which he later disavowed and which was printed without his authorization, there is no apparent reason why Mairet should have waited an average of six or seven years before publishing each successive play.

By the time he wrote his third play, Mairet had been considerably influenced by the duchess of Montmorency and her circle. The duchess, a cultivated patron of the arts like her husband, was a descendant of the powerful Orsini family and encouraged Mairet to study the masters of the Italian pastoral and to become involved in debates over the dramatic unities. In 1632, the duke was executed for treason, yet Mairet would never cease to extol the generosity of his former patron, however politically inexpedient this might seem. A period of financial difficulty followed, but Mairet was soon to find another generous and energetic protector in the count of Belin, who also surrounded himself with a group of gifted writers.

In the meantime, Mairet quickly established himself as one of the dramatic luminaries of his time. The eldest of a generation of playwrights who were to usher in French classical theater, Mairet managed to achieve at least a moderate success with all his plays through 1636. His Sylvie ranks alongside The Cid as the most popular play in the first half of the century. It was, in fact, the huge success of Corneille’s tragicomedy that marked the beginning of Mairet’s decline. Corneille’s tactless decision to publish an autobiographical poem extolling himself as the foremost writer of his generation (a judgment that no one would dispute today but that was not so obvious in 1637) prompted the irate Mairet to print a sarcastic response, under the pseudonym Don Baltazar de la Verdad. This ballad, which denies Corneille any poetic ability whatsoever and claims that The Cid was plagiarized word for word from a Spanish source, provoked an equally scathing response from Corneille. This led to a long and vehement quarrel, involving many of the leading poets of the day and resulting in the publication of more than thirty polemical pieces for or against Corneille, most of which do little credit to the memories of their authors. It required the intervention of Cardinal Richelieu and the newly formed French Academy to bring the quarrel to a halt.

One beneficial result of the quarrel for Mairet was that he ingratiated himself with the cardinal, who provided him with a pension, despite the poet’s earlier service to the cardinal’s enemy, the duke of Montmorency. The cardinal’s financial assistance became even more urgently needed when the count of Belin died in 1638. Mairet was not so fortunate, however, with his dramatic endeavors after 1637. Perhaps in response to the success of Corneille’s irregular plays, Mairet composed a group of tragicomedies in the Baroque spirit that disregarded the unities he had worked so hard to promote. All were dismal failures. A final tragicomedy, Sidonie, returned to the unities but was an even bigger fiasco. The ever-mounting popularity of Corneille, combined with the cardinal’s death in 1642, led Mairet to renounce the stage.

From 1645 to 1653, Mairet enjoyed a brilliant career as diplomatic representative of his native province of Franche-Comté (not yet part of France) in Paris. Mairet worked tirelessly to secure his province’s neutrality in the prolonged war between France and Spain and was instrumental in negotiating two important treaties in 1649 and 1651. In 1653, Mairet’s friends at the Spanish court were arranging to appoint him to an even more powerful post when Cardinal Mazarin, acting out of personal dislike for the poet and out of political expediency, exiled him to Besançon without warning. Mairet’s attempts to appeal this order proved futile, and he could not return to Paris until the peace treaty of 1659. Although warmly received by the Queen Mother, who presented him with a sum of money in recognition of past services, he decided not to remain in the capital. The loss of his wife, who had died in 1658 leaving no children, combined with the realization that he had long outlived both his literary and his diplomatic reputation, prompted him to return to Besançon, where he lived in retirement until his death at the age of eighty-one.

Analysis

During his lifetime, Jean Mairet helped establish the viability of the classical unities through his dramatic efforts. By placing believable personalities in plausible psychological conflicts, he avoided creating an aesthetic breach between dramatic theory and practice. Despite the inherent weaknesses in his works, he attained a level of believability during most of his career that furthered his primary desire, that of correctly interpreting the tastes of the audiences that he wished to please.

In the middle of the sixteenth century, the dramatic pastoral became a recognized genre in France, largely as a result of Italian influence. The refined portrayal of young love and the evocation of a delicious rustic fantasy world, free from material cares, where benevolent gods or magicians assured that all would turn out right, were among the principal attractions of the form. The 1620’s, when Jean Mairet composed his three pastoral plays , marked the high point of the genre’s popularity, soon to be eclipsed by that of tragedy. Already overly stylized and conventional, the pastoral had recently acquired a new vitality with the publication of Honoré d’Urfé’s monumental novel, L’Astrée (1607-1628; Astrea, 1657-1658). Besides appealing to his countrymen’s patriotism by setting his Arcadia in the Forez region of France, d’Urfé proved a model of stylistic excellence and a wide range of interesting plots and characters that would inspire the coming generation of playwrights. Mairet took the plots of his Chryséide et Arimand and La Silvanire directly from Astrea; Sylvie, based on a variety of literary sources, also shows the influence of d’Urfé.

Sylvie

Sylvie, probably the finest of all French pastorals, was certainly the most popular. It went through twenty-two editions in Mairet’s lifetime, fifteen of them in its first ten years, and remained in the active repertory for a number of years. Although much of the play’s charm derives from the delicate grace of Mairet’s poetry, its dramatic appeal results from a skillful mixture of elements from other dramatic genres. From the tragicomedy, Mairet took the chivalrous subplot of Prince Florestan, who falls in love with the beautiful Princess Méliphile upon viewing her portrait, undertakes a long and dangerous journey to meet her, is shipwrecked on the very island he seeks but is miraculously preserved, and finally wins the hand of his beloved by destroying a powerful magic spell. From the tragedy, Mairet took the cruel king who persecutes the young lovers and the moving episode in which the other pair of lovers, Thélame and Sylvie, each believing the other dead, pronounce a lament over the body of the beloved. These scenes were doubtless inspired by the tragedy Pyrame et Thisbé (1623) by Théophile and may well have been intended as Mairet’s homage to his late friend. There are even comic episodes, such as the scenes involving Sylvie’s materialistic parents, the delightfully witty repartee between the shepherdess and her rejected suitor Philène, and the stratagem whereby the latter tries to convince Sylvie of her prince’s infidelity.

Although Sylvie predates Mairet’s official acceptance of the three unities, it does try to observe the unity of place, at least in the flexible interpretation of the 1620’s and 1630’s. Apart from the opening scene set in Candia, the action is limited to a forest overlooking the coast of Sicily, with the two nearby dwellings, the royal palace where the Princess Méliphile and her brother Prince Thélame live, and the hut of Sylvie’s parents. Of more significance, though, is the presentation of the locale as an enchanted country blessed with exceptional fertility and beauty, conducive to blissful love and knightly adventure. Florestan, upon landing on the island, exclaims that this must be the abode of the gods. Thélame, revolted by the insincerity of life at court, goes there to seek not only love but also the purity and freedom of the natural order. This sense of exhiliarating liberation is mirrored in the plot, which focuses on the indomitable love between a prince and a shepherdess, despite the opposition of a jealous rival, the irate fathers, and considerations of state. Although it requires the intervention of an oracle to ordain their marriage, it should be noted that Mairet does not utilize the customary last-minute recognition scene revealing his heroine to be of noble birth.

Mairet showed little regard for the unities of time and action here, although the first four acts span roughly twenty-four hours. Like earlier pastorals, Sylvie moves at a leisurely pace, with little attempt to create suspense. Certain episodes could be eliminated with no effect on the denouement. There is no real character development, although Mairet does try to motivate Philène’s last-act change of heart (enabling him to marry the shepherdess Dorise, whom he has hitherto spurned). Finally, there is a note of unabashed sensuality, common to much of Mairet’s theater but which would be anathema to the following generation. The characters freely give vent to their feelings, and spontaneity sometimes comes at the expense of dignity, as in Thélame’s impetuous desire to enjoy Sylvie’s body. The sensuality never becomes excessive, however, for Sylvie is perfectly capable of safeguarding her honor. At the same time, she maintains an ironic distance from the hyperbolic language of love and courtship, making the triumph of simplicity and sincerity one of the key motifs of the play.

Les Galanteries du duc d’Ossonne

During the first three decades of the seventeenth century, comedy (as distinguished from farce) had virtually disappeared in France. Mairet contributed to the genre’s remarkable revival in the 1630’s with Les Galanteries du duc d’Ossonne, his sole comedy. Like his colleagues Corneille and Jean de Rotrou, he preferred to turn away from the comic stereotypes such as inept or scheming servants, pedants, elderly misers, and braggart soldiers to concentrate on the sentimental adventures of the leisure classes. The language is refined and chaste, even if the situations are not, the characters are more three-dimensional, and the lovers, rather than their intermediaries, are the active figures.

Mairet’s comedy has often been attacked for its immorality. To be sure, the love affairs in this play are all outside the bonds of marriage, and there is a notoriously risqué scene in which the Duke gets into Flavie’s bed after promising not to touch her. Nevertheless, compared to the novellas and comedies of the Renaissance, not to mention the real-life mores of the aristocracy in Mairet’s day, the play is relatively tame. It is not even clear whether the work scandalized its audience at the premiere in 1633, since the only known denunciations come from Corneille and his allies during the quarrel over The Cid four years later. In any event, the play is set during the carnival season, as the opening lines indicate, and the actions of the Duke, and to a lesser extent those of the other principals, stem from a delight in game playing and adventure for their own sake.

Although the title character is historical (1579-1624) and did serve as viceroy of Naples, the plot of the comedy is purely fictional. The Duke, having seen the young and beautiful Emilie at the theater, falls in love with her (although his passions are never deep or lasting) and plans to seduce her. When her obsessively jealous husband, Paulin, is forced to flee Naples for having ordered the murder of his wife’s beloved, Camille, the Duke offers him refuge in one of his country houses in order to keep him out of town. Paulin orders Emilie to stay with his widowed sister Flavie during his absence. The Duke, knowing that Flavie’s house is directly across the square from his palace, pays it a nocturnal visit, despite the harsh winter weather, and finds Emilie, who reveals that she loves the supposedly dying Camille but esteems the Duke. The Duke agrees to take her place in Flavie’s bed while she goes to pay a final visit to her beloved. Meanwhile, Flavie, having overheard this conversation, resolves to inform the Duke of her own love for him by feigning to talk in her sleep when he enters the room. When the Duke discovers that the widow is a ravishing lady of twenty, he takes a romantic interest in her, while continuing to pursue Emilie. Some time later, Camille, having recovered from his wounds, also becomes attracted to Flavie and plans to court both ladies. The sisters-in-law discover these infidelities and vow revenge. A simultaneous nocturnal visit to the house by the two men, each of whom is mistaken in the dark for the other, leads to the revelation of all secrets and a general reconciliation. Camille returns to Emilie and the Duke to Flavie, with all four planning to feast and rejoice in Paulin’s absence.

Because of its audacities, Mairet’s play had no direct successor. Nevertheless, the cleverly constructed plot, the fast-moving stage action, the lifelike characters, and the adroit combination of serious and humorous scenes make this one of the most readable of the French Baroque comedies.

Sophonisbe

Sophonisbeis a milestone in the history of French drama: the first tragedy composed in conscious conformity with the rules of classicism. The play’s undeniable merits, reinforced by a superb production by the Marais troupe of Paris, was a huge popular and critical success, which contributed even more than Mairet’s theoretical writings to the gradual acceptance of the rules and unities.

The subject of the courageous Carthaginian princess and her fierce determination to resist the domination of Rome had been treated by a number of earlier playwrights. Mairet’s greatest innovation lay in the focus on internal, rather than external, conflicts and in the presentation of the protagonists as complex, three-dimensional characters who are neither totally innocent nor totally guilty, yet never lose the audience’s sympathies. The conflict between duty and the destructive power of love is the central problem, as it would be in numerous other tragedies later in the century. Destiny (for the benevolent gods whom the characters frequently evoke fail to play any role in the action) seems to consist of two warring forces, the irresistible passion of love and the inflexible will of Rome, with the two lovers caught in the middle.

Mairet observes his cherished three unities without much difficulty. The action requires only twenty-four hours and, with the exception of a brief scene in Massinisse’s camp, is confined to two adjoining rooms in Sophonisbe’s palace. The plot moves swiftly toward the defeat and death of the principal characters and the total victory of the Romans. On the other hand, the rule of decorum (not fully codified at the time Mairet was writing) is sometimes violated. Syphax’s denunciation of his wife as a harlot, the kiss that ends the first interview between Massinisse and Sophonisbe, and the repeated references to the consummation of their marriage (between acts 3 and 4) would not be tolerated a mere decade later. There are also occasional interjections of comic dialogue—another feature that classicism would later proscribe.

Because Mairet conceived of his protagonists not as moral exempla inspiring admiration, but as fallible human beings whose plight creates pathos, he made several significant changes in the historical material. Syphax, Sophonisbe’s first husband, is, in this version, killed in the battle against the Romans so that her subsequent marriage to Massinisse appears more legitimate to a modern audience. Massinisse, unable to live without his beloved, commits suicide over her body at the end of the play. In Livy’s account, both husbands survive her. Moreover, Mairet’s Sophonisbe acts primarily out of love, and her patriotism and hatred of Roman tyranny rarely come to the fore. She thus appears as a fragile and delicate, rather than an aggressive and masculine, heroine. Finally, Mairet moves the decisive battle between the forces of Syphax and Massinisse to the area outside the city walls to guarantee the observance of the unities.

Throughout the play, the psychological struggles and transformations of the main characters provide the primary interest. The literal battle, which occurs offstage in act 2, is subordinated to the internal conflicts, and its outcome is determined by the characters’ feelings and actions that precede it. Syphax goes into battle hoping for death, having discovered that his wife has been unfaithful to him and has betrayed her country by corresponding with the enemy general, Massinisse. Sophonisbe, torn between her love for Massinisse, to whom she had been promised before her marriage to Syphax, and her feelings of guilt and shame at her recent actions, clearly hopes for her husband’s defeat, although she is far from confident about winning the victor’s heart. It is her internal anguish that dominates act 2, during which she is onstage throughout, receiving reports about the course of the battle outside. The long and powerful interview between Massinisse and Sophonisbe in act 3 is one of the earliest uses of the scène à faire or obligatory scene (a climactic confrontation between the two most active characters, moving the action in a wholly new direction). Their decision to marry at once in order to present Rome with a fait accompli prepares the confrontation in act 4 with Scipion, the unfeeling and unyielding representative of Rome. The struggle is necessarily unequal, for the Numidian prince Massinisse has been thoroughly trained in Roman ways and is totally dependent on Rome politically and militarily. Because the greatest concession that he can obtain is to spare his bride the humiliation of a triumphal procession by making her take poison, the concluding scenes deal with the lovers’ despair and suicides. Their steadfast devotion to each other and their courageous acceptance of death ultimately restore them to the dignity of tragic heroes.

Bibliography

Bunch, William A. Jean Mairet. Boston: Twayne, 1975. A basic treatment of Mairet’s life and works. Includes a bibliography and index.

Chadwick, C. “The Role of Mairet’s Sophonisbe in the Development of French Tragedy.” Modern Language Review 50 (1955): 176-179. Chadwick examines Mariet’s Sophonisbe and how it helped developed the genre of tragedy in France.

Kay, Burf. The Theatre of Jean Mairet: The Metamorphosis of Sensuality. The Hague: Mouton, 1975. Kay analyzes the works of Mairet in terms of the sensuality employed in them. Includes a bibliography and index.