With his own sword... I have ta'en / His head from him

How are we meant to classify Cymbeline? (This question assumes something that I think we all -- with apologies to Philip Sidney -- now have difficulty accepting: that plays can be sturdily classified at all.) In the folio of 1623 (there is no earlier quarto text), Heminges and Condell group the play with the tragedies and it is called, in fact, The Tragedy of Cymbeline (it has the privilege of ending the collection, immediately following that other knee-slapper Antony and Cleopatra) -- but it lacks the kind of catastrophe all the other tragedies have (revelations and reversals, here, lead to marriage and political unity, not to death and the collapse of the state). Modern editors try to identify the genre as "romance", or "tragicomedy", grouping it with Pericles, The Tempest, and The Winter's Tale, all from the end of Shakespeare's career. But if we take Fletcher's definition of tragicomedy -- that "it wants [lacks] deaths" -- Shakespeare's play seems, from the instant Guiderius enters proudly displaying Cloten's severed head, to defy that generic decorum as well. Cloten -- like, in The Winter's Tale, the famously unfortunate Antigonus (food for bears, to paraphrase Prince Hal) -- is the blood sacrifice that seems to problematize the question of genre. Bevington suggests there is a hybridity to the world of Shakespeare's late plays that is somehow a nostalgic retrospective on his preceding career: "In his late tragicomic romances, Shakespeare is revisiting the imaginary landscape of his earlier romantic comedies, while still preoccupied with the emotional and spiritual crises of his tragedies." (Shakespeare; Blackwell, 2002; p.202)

I think, actually, that now, looking back over what I've just written (and what Bevington states rather plainly), I would like to rephrase my question and play the devil's advocate: Instead of how are we meant to classify the play?, I feel that it may be more useful to first ask Why are we meant to classify the play? Did Shakespeare think and write generically? If so, does this process help us imagine ourselves closer to the taboo authorial intention? And, if that's true, are we really succeeding at that? If not, are we merely imposing a critical structure in an attempt to, like Sidney, control the work in the name of decorum? Does the act of classification -- from Heminges and Condell's categorical arrangement of the 1623 folio to the present day -- in some way deny the innovative power of the writer, insert the play into a formulaic system of dramatization, and, as Hamlet warns, pluck out the heart of his mystery? Is the decapitation of Cloten (and the consumption of Antigonus) Shakespeare throwing down the gauntlet before tragicomedy? Has he, with its own sword, taken the genre's very head?