for Yiddish theatre. By the end of the year, others were writing Yiddish plays as well, such as Moses Horowitz with Der tiranisher bankir (The Tyrannical Banker), or Grodner with Curve un ganev (Prostitute and Thief), and Yiddish theatre had become big theatre, with elaborate sets, duelling choruses, and extras to fill out crowd scenes. Goldfaden was helped by Ion Ghica, then head of the Romanian National Theatre to legally establish a "dramatic society" to handle administrative matters. From those papers, it is known that the troupe at the Jigniţa included Moris Teich, Michel Liechman (Glückman), Lazăr Zuckermann, Margareta Schwartz, Sofia Palandi, Aba Goldstein, and Clara Goldstein. We also know from similar papers that when Grodner and Mogulescu walked out on Goldfaden to start their own company, it included (besides themselves) Israel Rosenberg, Jacob Spivakovsky, P. Şapira, M. Banderevsky, Anetta Grodner, and Rosa Friedman. Ion Ghica was a valuable ally for Yiddish theatre in Bucharest. On several occasions he expressed his favourable view of the quality of the acting, and even more of the technical aspects of the Yiddish theatre. In 1881, he obtained for the National Theatre the costumes that had been used for a Yiddish pageant on the coronation of King Solomon, which had been timed in tribute to the actual coronation of Carol I of Romania. Turning serious While light comedy and satire might have established Yiddish theatre as a commercially successful medium, it was Goldfaden's higher aspirations for it that eventually earned him recognition as "the Yiddish Shakespeare." As a man broadly read in several languages, he was acutely aware that there was no Eastern European Jewish tradition of dramatic literature – that his audience was used to seeking just "a good glass of Odobeşti and a song." Years later, he would paraphrase the typical Yiddish theatregoer of the time as saying to him: "We don't go to the theatre to make our head swim with sad things. We have enough troubles at home... we go to the theatre to cheer ourselves up. We pay up a coin and hope to be distracted, we want to laugh from the heart." Goldfaden wrote that this attitude put him "pure and simply at war with the public." His stage was not to be merely "a masquerade"; he continued: "No, brothers. If I have arrived at having a stage, I want it to be a school for you. In