As a side textual note, in the first publication of The Fair Penitent (1703), as well in the 1714 and 1732 texts, the "Base betrayer!" phrase alluded to in Joyce's short story's appears as "She called me Villain! Monster! Base! Betrayer!" The original may have harkened back to Lothario's complaint that he could not marry Calista because of her father's rejection of his suit--perhaps he was too "base," meaning not noble enough, a fairly common point of question in the early eighteenth century.
Lothario is listed, however, on the character page as a "young lord," the same as Altamount, and Calista's father as a nobleman. Calista's father had been impressed by Altamount's noble gesture of offering to take his dead father's place in debtor's prison in order to release his body--both young lords seem to be without great estates. The word "base" is used on its own throughout the play at least twelve other times--modifying phrases such as "base, unmanner'd slave" and paired variously with "poor" and "desire," "ungratitude," and "betrayer" (in another passage).
The change is best explained by a mistake by a typographer or publisher for the 1730 text. The lines, have been printed this way since (except in 1732): "She called me villain! Monster! Base betrayer!" The adjectival modification of betrayer as a "base betrayer" suggests that Lothario has not only betrayed Calista but that he is without moral principles entierly. It is this combined meaning that Joyce's character alludes to, but the doubleness of its punctuation history seems both Joycean and apt for the base characters in "Two Gallants." It is unlikely that Joyce knew of the textual error, the first scholarly edition noting the change in the wording appeared in 1907. "Two Gallants" was written over the winter of 1905-6.
