To be? There’s no question here. If it were not for a pair of friends, the plays of William Shakespeare would not be.

Seven years after the Bard died in 1616, John Heminge and Henry Condell, actors in the theater company he belonged to, published most of his plays in a folio format — large, double-sided pages folded only once. Half of the 36 plays had never been printed before, including “Macbeth,” “The Tempest” and “The Winter’s Tale.”

Now referred to as Shakespeare’s First Folio, they are precious. Fewer than half of the original 750 copies remain, and one of them will be displayed in Hawaii, starting Monday through May 25 in the Lama Library at Kapiolani Community College. Admittance to the exhibit, “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare,” is free.

The Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., home to 82 of the 233 folios left in the world, created a First Folio tour that will stop in all 50 states, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

“When I say it is unprecedented, I am not just saying that glibly,” said Mark Lawhorn, a Kapiolani Community College English professor and director of the Hawaii First Folio Project. “The Folger Library has never sent these books out. This is something they are doing to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. I am not going to predict if they are going to try it again in 100 years.”

If not for Heminge and Condell, much of Shakespeare would have been lost.

“We would not have all these plays,” said Lawhorn, a Shakespeare scholar who got his doctorate from the English Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. “For that fact alone this is a cultural treasure to many, many people around the world.”

Shakespeare wrote his plays by hand, and that copy is referred to as “the author’s foul pages,” Lawhorn said. Published copies would have to go to a scribe with better handwriting before going to press.

Actors in a 17th-century Shakespeare play would not receive the full script, only the pages with their scenes — same as today’s TV and film actors. These were called “sides” and presumably were given the scribe treatment as well, Lawhorn said.

Hosting the exhibit is no easy feat, Lawhorn said. The college turned one of its rooms into a museum-quality space to display a special case that holds the folio. (And in case you were wondering about the folio’s value: The last one that went up for auction fetched $5 million.)

“We have giant dehumidifiers cranking, security cameras installed that can see in the dark 24 hours a day and security that will be in sight of the folio when the display is open,” Lawhorn said. “It’s a challenge, but some of us thought it was worth making happen.”

The Folger Library is paying about $60,000 to ship the folio to Hawaii, the Sidney Stern Memorial Trust is covering the $10,000 needed for security measures and the Hawaii branch of the English-Speaking Union is paying $70,000 for special exhibit lighting and a companion exhibit.

Shakespeare scholar Valerie Wayne, a professor emerita of English at UH, said the Bard’s plays endure because he was a powerful storyteller.

“Sometimes the language can serve as an obstruction to understanding his plays,” she said. “But when you see them on stage, the story so readily conveyed and the language more readily understood, then one can take in the combination and be deeply moved.”