Sharing Shakespeare with Sarah

This is really funny because I had two wonderful conversations about Shakespeare, each with a girl named Sarah.
First Sarah: My friend from the dorms last year. Talkative, science major, loves Hamlet.
We spoke together for an hour about random things right before Thanksgiving break and fortunately for me I told her about my Shakespeare class and she told me that she loved Hamlet. Our views about Hamlet are very different. The first and major clash comes from me not liking Hamlet (although that is beginning to change with my final project coming along). We discussed Hamlet's craziness and she said the same thing that I hear a lot about Hamlet: is he really crazy or is he faking it? No one can really tell, right? Well, she gave me her opinion on that: Hamlet isn't crazy in the beginning and he's in complete control but as the play progresses he starts to lose it. I find this concept quite compellingly believable (but I still want to ask Shakespeare for the real deal).
I brought up my opinion of Gertrude, mainly that she is a weak woman who doesn't really control herself as much as she should. We began discussing the end of the play, when Gertrude drinks the poisoned drink meant for Hamlet. I thought of an interesting point: did Gertrude know that the cup was poisoned? If she did, did she drink it to spare her son's life? Sarah disagreed with the second point, but she did think that Gertrude knew about the poison.
I really enjoyed discussing Shakespeare with her because she is so good at sharing her strongly formed opinions.