The game, the fencing duel between Hamlet and Laertes is, in a sense, a rhetorical expression the drama of actual war.   The money gambled is the rhetoric of death.  Of course, Claudius and Laertes intend that the rhetoric of death will carry with it the philosophy death -- i.e., the game will end in actual homicide.    

The game is never finished because the imitated thing -- death itself -- breaks in on the rhetorical game and irreparably interrupts it.  

Tragedy breaks the oscillation.   Even as Hamlet and the king are killed, the philosophical and the rhetorical also destroy one another.  Yet Horatio (philospher) and Fortinbras (rhetorician) survive.

Compare, the play within the play.

Electronic Forms and Such

Death Itself