What Can We Learn About Hamlet Solely From The Speeches Of The Other Characters

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What can we learn about Hamlet solely from the speeches of the other characters?

We first start to learn about what others thought of Hamlet when in act 1 scene 3 Laertes warns Ophelia about getting too involved with Hamlet, because he toys with passion, saying that “perhaps he loves you now”(Ln 14) and that “his will is not his own. For he himself is subject to his birth” (Ln 17-18). As Hamlet is the prince, he does not have full control over his choice in marriage. Polonius also warns her off him unless he can offer more.

Polonius thinks that Hamlet’s madness could be attributed to the love for his daughter Ophelia, after she came and told Polonius that Hamlet frightened her by his strange behaviour and appearance while she was in her closet sewing. Polonius thinks that “This is the very ecstasy of love” (Act 2 Sc1 Ln 102). He then feels bad because he instructed Ophelia to reject all Hamlet’s letters and to deny him access to her. Polonius subsequently comes to the conclusion “That hath made him mad.”(Ln 10) then goes off with Ophelia to tell the king of his findings.
Gertrude doubts Polonius’s discovery and thinks the death of the King Hamlets father and her hasty marriage to his brother Claudius, is the cause of Hamlet’s “distemper”.

In act 3 Claudius is talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who he has brought in to spy on Hamlet, to find out what the cause is of his disposition, and in Sc 1 Ln7 Guildenstern reveals that he thinks Hamlet is playing them all “with a crafty madness”.
Claudius then seems happy with the knowledge that Hamlet is delighted that the players are coming, saying “and it doth much content me to hear him so inclined” (Sc 1 Ln 24-25) They then go on to put Polonius’s theory to the test by setting Ophelia up to meet with Hamlet, when Gertrude expresses to Ophelia “I do wish that your good beauties be the happy cause of Hamlets wildness; so shall I hope y...