Although Hermione in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale is certainly a sympathetic victim, and what happens to her can be considered "tragic," in the modern, generalized, and overused meaning of the word, Hermione fails to fulfill the essential requirements of a classic "tragic hero" in either the Aristotelean or Shakespearean sense of the term.

Like many tragic heroes, Hermione is a virtuous, dignified, and honorable person of high stature—Queen of Sicilia and daughter of the Emperor of Russia—who suffers during the play, and that suffering appears to result in her downfall and her death.

Unlike many tragic heroes, however, Hermione doesn't exhibit a tragic flaw, like the arrogance or excessive pride (hubris) that many tragic heroes in ancient Greek tragedies exhibit and which are exhibited by Hermione's own husband, King Leontes, in The Winter's Tale and by many of Shakespeare's tragic characters, including Coriolanus, King Lear, Macbeth, Richard II, Richard III, and Othello.

Lacking a tragic flaw, Hermione is incapable of making a fateful, and often fatal, mistake in judgement (hamatria) that is an essential element in a tragic hero's downfall. Hermione's downfall doesn't occur as a result of her own decisions, but is imposed on her by Leontes and by the circumstances that he, not Hermione, has created.

Hermione does suffer a reversal of fate (peripeteia) that is common to all tragic heroes, but, again, her reversal of fate—being thrown into prison by Leontes under the false assumption that Hermione is being unfaithful to him with Polixenes—is not the result of her own tragic flaw or her own mistakes in judgment.

Hermione also doesn't experience anagnorisis, which is a moment of revelation, realization, or clarity about herself, another character in the play, or her own situation. Hermione is well aware of all of these things either from the beginning of the play or as circumstances develop during the course of the play. There is no sudden realization or turn of events precipitated by a tragic flaw or a wrong decision on Hermione's part.

A tragic hero's downfall should cause the audience to experience a catharsis, which is a release of the emotions of pity and fear. Hermione's seeming downfall elicits a certain level of sympathy and pity for Hermione and for her children, particularly at the death of her son, Mamillius, and for her baby girl, Perdita, but Hermione's downfall doesn't engender any sense of fear in the audience that the same fate that befell Hermione could happen to them.

Finally, the whole idea of Hermione's tragic downfall goes out the window when it's revealed in the final scene of the play that Hermione didn't die from grief at the word of Mamillius's death but has simply been in hiding for the past sixteen years.