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Jean (de) Mairet (10 May 160431 January 1686) was a classical French language dramatist who wrote both tragedy and comedy.
Mairet was one of the bitterest assailants of Pierre Corneille in the controversy over the violation of the classical unities in Corneille's play Le Cid. He produced several pamphlets against Corneille, who responded more than once, most famously with his Advertissement au Besançonnois Mairet (1637). The personal intervention of Cardinal Richelieu was eventually required to calm the furore in the theatres. It was perhaps his jealousy of the successful Corneille, together with the deaths of his aristocratic patrons, first the duc de Montmorency (1632) and then François de Faudoas, comte de Belin, that made Mairet give up writing for the stage.
He was appointed in 1648 official representative of his home country, the county of Burgundy, which allowed him to stay in Paris, but in 1653 he was banished by Cardinal Mazarin. He was subsequently allowed to return, but in 1668 he retired to Besançon, and subsequently rarely left.
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