Shakespeare, the Book Tour

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The star of the tour: a First Folio opened to a scene from “Hamlet.” Credit Aaron C. Packard for The New York Times

VERMILLION, S.D. — Visitors to this town of about 11,000 on a bluff near the Missouri River have long been surprised to learn that it’s home to a set of rare Stradivari stringed instruments, which are housed in a museum here along with the world’s oldest playable harpsichord, the oldest surviving cello and some 15,000 other historic instruments.

But this month, visitors to the National Music Museum on the University of South Dakota campus have also found themselves face to face with another seemingly misplaced cultural treasure: a Shakespeare First Folio.

The book, on loan from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, drew a steady stream of visitors last Saturday, including Amy Redhage, who had driven seven hours from Lowden, Iowa, with her five children.

“I went to Stratford-on-Avon with my high school orchestra, but I don’t think we got to see anything like a First Folio,” she said with a touch of reverence.

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This traveling exhibition, “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare,” will offer a projected 750,000 visitors nationwide an up-close view of one of the enduring monuments of literary history, which is shown open to the page containing Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, the Folio collected 36 of Shakespeare’s plays (most of his output), 18 of which were unpublished in his lifetime.

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