And such individual notes of recognition are collected into a sort of chorus when Margaret appears the second time to point out the fulfilment of her curses, and sits down beside the old Duchess and her daughter-in-law to join in the 'society of sorrow' and 'cloy her' with beholding the revenge for which she has hungered.
by prophecy,
Again, the nemeses have a further emphasis given to them by prophecy. i. iii, from 195.As Queen Margaret's second appearance is to mark the fulfilment of a general retribution, so her first appearance denounced it beforehand in the form of curses. And the effect is carried on in individual prophecies: the Queen's friends as they suffer foresee that the turn of the opposite party will come:
iii. iii. 7.
You live that shall cry woe for this hereafter;
and Hastings prophesies Buckingham's doom:
iii. iv. 109.
They smile at me that shortly shall be dead.
It is as if the atmosphere cleared for each sufferer with the approach of death, and they then saw clearly the righteous plan on which the universe is constructed, and which had been hidden from them by the dust of life.
and especially by irony.